That goes for background and unconscious beliefs, too. Unstated is not unstatable. — Banno
the person who believes this [that "tiger" is no more perspicuous about the world than "tiger + my left thumb"] ... is making a mistake.
— J
Well, yes, interesting. So what is the mistake here? Not grasping the essence, if grasping the essence is just using the word; not intending, since one can as much intend tiger-and-thumb as tiger.
Maybe have another look at the rejection of atomism in PI, around §48. How far can the argument there be taken? — Banno
This, like various other philosophical questions, is better deflected than met head on. Instead of worrying about the simple verb "believes" as relating men to some manner of believed things, we can retreat to the word-pair "believes true" as relating men directly to sentences. We can retreat to this without claiming that believed things are sentences; we can simply waive that claim, and the philosophical question behind it. After all, our factual interest in what some speaker of English believes is fully satisfied by finding out what sentences he believes to be true. — Quine & Ullian, 5
and I find it so odd to see people hell-bent on impugning it. — Leontiskos
You are welcome to set out what you think McDowell is saying that Anscombe says. — Banno
Retreat? Deflect? And what does he mean by "waive that claim"? — J
If you're willing, go here and read pp. 16-20. — J
A certain core realism is, as much as anything, the shared dogma of analytic
philosophers, and rightly so. The world is out there, waiting to be discovered,
it’s not constituted by us—all that good stuff. Everyone agrees that this realist
picture prohibits truth from being generally mind-dependent in the crudest
counterfactual sense, but surely it requires more. After all, the grue things
would all have turned bleen at the appointed hour even if humans had never
existed; under one of Reichenbach’s coordinative definitions one can truly say
that “spacetime would still have been Euclidean even if humans had never
existed”. The realist picture requires the “ready-made world” that Goodman
(1978) ridiculed; there must be structure that is mandatory for inquirers to
discover. To be wholly egalitarian about all carvings of the world would give
away far too much to those who view inquiry as the investigation of our own
minds. — Theodore Sider, Ontological Realism, 18
Is a word called “common” on account of the common cause things agree in, or on account of the common conception, or on account of both together? — Abelard via Paul Vincent Spade | Medieval Universals | SEP
The main thrust of [Abelard's] arguments against the collection-theory is that collections are arbitrary integral wholes of the individuals that make them up, so they simply do not fill the bill of the Porphyrian characterizations of the essential predicables such as genera and species.[29]
29. No wonder that in modern philosophies of language, mostly inspired by the “collection-theorist” view of quantification theory, we have the persistent problem of providing a principled distinction between essential and non-essential predicates. — Abelard via Paul Vincent Spade | Medieval Universals | SEP
"A believes that P" is not a restriction on what one might do, think or feel. It is a stipulations as to which of those things might be best called a belief. "A believes that P" says that a belief is had by someone, which I hope is not controversial, and also that the content of a belief can be true or false. It's by way of setting out what it is we are discussing.But the problem is that we're now invoking an unstated something that is supposed to be identical to a statement. — J
The obvious response is that what it is we recognise when we recognise a tiger is, well, the tiger. — Banno
So would it be fair to say that, in the example of the tiger, we must refer to the tiger itself? And a disagreement about the tiger's "essentiality" (or definition, if you prefer) would be investigated by saying, in effect, "Let's return to the tiger. Let's examine him more closely in the relevant aspects so we can learn which of us is right"?
— J
This isn't meant to be some sort of trick question that implies there's no such thing as "being a tiger."
Of course there is. Nor am I suggesting that "how to recognize a tiger" is the same problem as "what constitutes a tiger." But we should think carefully about how we determine both these things, because when we move to abstracta, the problems increase by an order of magnitude. — J
My approach to answering this is quite different to , but that should not be taken as implying that he is mistaken."We're just going to declare that issue out of bounds, and talk about 'believing true' instead." — J
They are, speaking more roughly than one should, states of affairs or ways things are in the world."Therefore, one tends to conclude that the things believed are not the sentences themselves. What, then, are they?" — J
Presumably the process of recognising a tiger takes place in the neural web in one's head, and recognising patterns is what neural webs do. Attaching the word "tiger" presumably involves an extra layer of that web. I understand that recognition occurs in the Medial temporal lobe while the words are found in Wernicke’s area.The answer that comes to me initially is that we recognize a unique example of a kind of pattern that we have come to associate with the concept 'tiger'. Not sure if that is an adequate answer. — Janus
I'll have to come back to this paper when I have some time. I would like to get a handle on the more formal aspects of Sider's account. — Banno
Thanks again for taking this discussion seriously and engaging with it fully. — Banno
a thread in which you posted 69 times — Leontiskos
Tell us more about me. — Banno
The belief need not be identical to the statement about it. — Banno
Let me know if I have miscomprehended Sider — Banno
I would like to get a handle on the more formal aspects of Sider's account. — Banno
Thanks again for taking this discussion seriously and engaging with it fully. — Banno
Semantic ascent . . . but here he is reversing the process. — Banno
"Therefore, one tends to conclude that the things believed are not the sentences themselves. What, then, are they?"
— J
They are, speaking more roughly than one should, states of affairs or ways things are in the world. — Banno
Good, but then what is it? — J
I agree this doesn't help. And here Anscombe's response comes more in to play, in that beliefs are more than just inclinations. We might also include the neural net pattern recognition mentioned in my reply to , but also the state of the world in "Pat believes the tree is an oak"......propensity... — J
What kind of benefit do you think they would get from not impugning it? — Apustimelogist
If it is just saying that there are statistical structures and regularities in reality, then fine. But why do I need to use the word "essence"? Seems to connote something more than is required so I don't need to use the word. — Apustimelogist
Let's assume for the sake of argument an older, realist perspective. Things have essences. Our senses grasp the quiddity of things. We all, as humans, share a nature and so share certain sorts of aims, desires, powers, faculties, etc. Given this, given we are already interacting with the same things, with the same abstractions, and simply dealing with them using different stipulated signs, translation doesn't seem like that much a problem. We might even allow that our concepts (intentions) and understandings of things might vary, but they are only going to vary so much.
The idea that "all we have to go on is behavior" seems like it could be taken as an implicit assumption of nominalism. Yet then the conclusion seems to be, in some sense, an affirmation of nominalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If it is just saying that there are statistical structures and regularities in reality, then fine. — Apustimelogist
tools are for using — Banno
There's a presumption that it has to be a something. After all, it has a noun; and nouns name things, so there must be a thing that "belief" names. — Banno
What do you think of that argument? It strikes me as an error to suppose that because there is a name there must be a thing named — Banno
We say someone has the concept "five" when they can add to five, count five, divide by five and so on. — Banno
"Triangle" is a concept which encompasses all sorts of different images, both mental and real. It is universal - it spans many particulars. — Leontiskos
I was thinking of starting a reading group on the SEP article, but I don't currently have time to field it. Feel free to start it yourself. — Leontiskos
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