Well great. But then why shouldn't natural philosophy be the default position?

If supernaturalism is not a real theory in that you agree it has no particular form, let alone any particular consequences, how could we reasonably ever believe in some or other version of it? What on earth justifies a belief for which there is neither a theory nor the evidence?

As usual, the only argument you can make is that - in some specified way - current natural theory fails to explain some kind of observable that matters.

That kind of criticism is important. But what did my account of natural teleology leave out exactly?

If there is no big daddy god with his own mysterious purpose in mind, what more is there to the Cosmos than what I've outlined? If you believe it to be the Platonic Good, then put it on the table as a counter-argument.

And the funny thing is that these supernatural alternatives - either the unpatterned bliss of Nirvana or the frozen eternal perfection of Platonia do sound remarkably like a Heat Death cosmology. Is a life without contrast and challenge really ever going to be that exciting or fullfilling?

Half a dozen folk trying to convince me I ought not be certain of what cannot be doubted. — Banno

Yep. People asking you to be reasonable and account for certainty in terms of a pragmatic limit on doubting?

Well fuck that. You are here to preach, not discuss.

Something like Pascal’s Wager (although not quite the same). — Wayfarer

But there's your problem. If it ain't your Heaven and Hell version of a Biblical creator, then which of the umpteen varieties of speculative supernaturalism should I pretend to treat as if it were a real constraint on my everyday life? A Muslim one? An Aztec one? A Satanist one? An Eastern reincarnation one?

And if it winds up being your kind of divinity - one with all the rough edges knocked off to make it some kind of vague and bland feel-good generality - doesn't it also then loose all its bite? It doesn't in fact make a difference. We all wind up in the same place anyway?

So your "good bet" needs some actual fleshing out here.

Depending on whether it's a good bet, or not. — Wayfarer

Is a good bet one that is reasonable, or did you have some other definition of a good bet?

Well, you see, I think this is ultimately a nihilistic attitude, regrettably, and that it comes from limiting the understanding to only what is physical or natural. — Wayfarer

Technically it is not "nihilism" to believe that Nature has intrinsic purpose and that we also have the freedom, indeed responsibility, to construct our own personal meanings within that.

Also, it is isn't an "attitude" if it is simply what reasoned inquiry shows to be the case. It is accepting how things are having asked the question of how things are.

But yes. Rejecting supernatural explanations that have the epistemic status of being "not even wrong" seems a small sacrifice to make in metaphysics.

In terms of purpose, the only biological purpose is survival and reproduction, but the end point - the ‘final cause’, so to speak - is the recovery of thermodynamic equilibrium, which is to all intents non-existence, is it not? — Wayfarer

Sure. We have to pay for our freedoms in terms of the much greater amount of waste heat that we generate.

So we can have our private purposes that seem diametrically opposed to the largest purpose that is the Cosmos's own project - the drive towards the ultimate simplicity and tranquility of its Heat Death. But those private purposes are ultimately entrained to that general Cosmic purpose. And often - as with global warming - we don't even seem to want to oppose that generalised project. We don't really care about the freedoms we can extract from fossil fuels as we don't really seem to have our own private projects that are actually "diametrically opposed" to the general entropic flow.

So sure. We could spend our freedom more wisely by developing a better sense of purpose. We might want to care more about our long-term flourishing. But still, ultimately, we are part of nature and so constrained by what is, in the largest sense, natural.

If we choose to be a boom/bust extinction event, that is still a pretty routine evolutionary choice.

The past constrains the future, but it doesn't absolutely determine the future. So the past leaves the future only relatively determined in terms of its propensities.

Physical models can of course simplify the situation and treat the dynamics of the world as mechanical and time-reversible. But that Newtonian view is known to be an over-simplification both due to the laws of thermodynamics and quantum theory.

If we put all our physical laws together, they tell us the world is a place where the past does constrain the future, but can't absolutely determine the future.

Then when it comes to freewill, there is further science to inform our metaphysics.

Any living and mindful system is a dissipative thermodynamic structure that employs information to regulate dynamics. It uses a symbolic memory and code - like genes, neurons, words - to step back from the world so as to be able to control that world.

So biology depends on an epistemic cut that is the basis of autonomy or "freewill" in the broadest sense. Physics has no direct or deterministic control over what gets written into the memory of a mind. Biology exists as a state of matter because it uses a semiotic mechanism to divorce its essence as completely as possible as it can from the particular "hardware" on which it runs its "computations".

Of course, biology then can only choose to use that power over nature to act in a self-interested fashion - to build and maintain a body, to function and thrive in an environment. But it is completely unmysterious why organisms exhibit autonomy. We know that biology is dynamics + information. We can see exactly where the disconnect between even the relative determinism of the one, and the almost complete lack of determination of the other, takes place.

That folk continue to think Newtonian determinism is some kind of fundamental problem for complex human psychology some 330 years after the Principia is actually amazing.

Here's a basis for an epistemology: Some statements are true. And there are some statements which it is unreasonable to doubt. — Banno

Nah. Still doesn't work.

Can any statement be known to be true as opposed to being asserted as true, or defined as true, or believed and acted upon as if true?

Tell us how a statement can be known to be true.

And then what exactly do you mean to claim by slipping into the objective register when talking about something that is subjective in requiring a subject?

You are trying to avoid any locution which admits that for there to be knowledge, there must be a knower. For there to be belief, a believer. For there to be certainty, someone for whom doubt is at least a possibility. Etc.

So as usual you are trying to resolve the basic epistemic issues by using words in a fashion to talk past them. You simply say the statements are true, ignoring that statements need staters - who then have reasons and beliefs and doubts and all the rest.

In the same fashion you flip=flop between the subjective and objective framing to avoid the obvious epistemic elephants in the room.

That you are in Fremantle guzzling sprats is something certain - from your subjective point of view. As a statement you publicly make, why wouldn't other minds doubt that?

No. When it comes to the public issue, you switch to the objective phrasing. It is simply an objective and mind-independent truth to say "Banno is guzzling sprats in Fremantle" is true IFF Banno is guzzling sprats in Fremantle. Anyone of us could get on a plane and assure ourselves of this recalcitrant fact.

It's comical really. You seem to have started out with a decent philosophical education. Yet at some point you have become convinced by some very silly rhetorical positions on epistemology. Perhaps you love the scandal they cause?

But they do seem to infect all your views - such as when you go on to assert various moral positions as unquestionable and objective truths.

Modern life is so full of ambiguity and subtlety. Yet despite a training in critical thinking, you just want a pre-modern simplicity when it comes to any epistemological discussion.

Curious.

Sure you can play the game of pedant and claim confusion or evil daemon or whatever you like. — Banno

Is it pedantic to say one is reasonably certain, or justifiably certain, but never absolutely certain, or certain without qualification?

On what argument?

Is that pretty certain, absolutely certain, cross your heart and hope to die certain, as certain as you can reasonably be?

Anyway, I’m certain you’re not in Femantle.

Put forward your argument. It’s been years. You still haven’t.

Come on, a cursory glance over my argument will show that's not the case, you're just being disingenuous for effect. — Pseudonym

Im arguing that the only use to which I've ever seen that kind of theory put is to denigrate animals in such a way as to justify their mistreatment. That is the reason why I'm opposed to it. — Pseudonym

Disingenuous? Moi?

So you’ve got nothing but the demand I should share your certainty?

Sounds like the epistemology of a solipsist.

Again you are claiming certainty in regard to your assertion?

Sounds legit.

Yep. You are in a little world all of your own on this one.

So I can’t doubt your statement?

Sounds legit.

Im arguing that the only use to which I've ever seen that kind of theory put is to denigrate animals in such a way as to justify their mistreatment. That is the reason why I'm opposed to it. — Pseudonym

Hmm. So you have adopted a moral position and you demand the science must find a way to support it?

I don't believe that is how it works.

I don't think we're going to make any progress here. We agree that human language is worlds away from other animals, you think that distance is so significant as to affect our thought process and requires a whole new language to describe its effects, I don't. — Pseudonym

Well I flatter myself that I go beyond the usual lumper vs splitter dichotomies. My aim is to be accurate about the continuities, and accurate about the discontinuities. And I don't operate with a preconceived notion of what the "right answers" ought to be.

As I say, this area was also my specialist subject about 30 years ago (while oddly enough, computer science was where I was focused just before that).

A Cray is not a souped up microcomputer. A vector processing architecture is very different from a scalar processing one. So bad analogy.

Likewise human language is different in being an articulate and syntactical code. It is capable of unlimited expression from limited means due to its infinite combinational possibilities.

Language in that sense exists in no other species. Fact.

But consciousness, if defined as the modeling relation itself is foundational and so could also be considered to be, in that sense, substantial. — Janus

But that is how I redefine "consciousness" - as a biosemiotic modelling relation. And then beyond that, I would agree with Peirce's project of total generalisation in the form of pan-semiotic physicalism. Even the universe arises from this kind of "mind-full" self-organising relation.

So I am happy to rewrite substance ontology in terms of a process metaphysics. My complaint here is that you still seem to be arguing from a substance metaphysics. I agree, it might only seem that way. We might be in strong agreement in the end.

But consciousness, if defined as the modeling relation itself is foundational and so could also be considered to be, in that sense, substantial. — Janus

That is confusing phrasing. Why would we want to treat consciousness or mindfulness or any "one thing" as fundamental? The modelling relation is irreducibly triadic. It is a process and so the substantial is what emerges in the end, at the limit. It still sounds like you want to make idealism come out right despite endorsing a modelling relations story.

I'm not saying Peirce argues for that (although it might be what he is alluding to with his notion of matter as "effete mind"). — Janus

So you do want to make idealism top dog here! :)

I think you are caught between two metaphysics and you still have to work through to reach a position that is actually self-consistent. That still seems the basic issue here.

If we count the modeling relation itself as being consciousness, then it would be in a restricted sense ( as individual consciousness) that the interpretant would be considered to represent consciousness. Taken that way then it would not be right to say the interpretant is fundamental. On the other hand if we think there is a God...then the sign relation would be like the holy trinity, where the interpretant is the father, the object is the son, and the sign is the holy spirit. — Janus

Again, you want to take a semiotic metaphysics - which is immanent, emergent and irreducibly triadic - and make it fit an idealist metaphysics which permits transcendence, foundationalism and absolute separability.

The interpretant is talked of as a third element - a habit of mind in the presence of a sign. Yet really, in being identified with Thirdness, we have to remember that Thirdness becomes the third that incorporates the other two - the Firstness that is the uncertainty of the world, the Secondness which is the crispness of a sign, a reaction. So Thirdness stands for the whole of the sign relation, and not just the third element of that relation - the interpretant.

So while Peircian semiotics sounds analytic - three separable parts in relation - it is actually synthetic or holistic. The three parts are irreducibly in a relation that has to involve all three. The relation itself is the three-cornered thing - or the hierarchical organisation.

Thus - even joking - God, son and holy spirit would have to be irreducibly related in a collaboratively causal fashion. So there could be no leftover notions of transcendence, foundationalism or separability to celebrate. That would have to be an explicit outcome of adopting a semiotic metaphysics here, not something that could be fudged for any lingering feel-good reasons.

I'm not sure we are really disagreeing so much as it being a matter of emphasis. — Janus

That's what I said. All these different bits of jargon - truth, belief, certainty, justification, etc - they are emphasising different aspects of a pragmatic modelling relation.

And the Peircean notion of that is anti-foundationalist in treating the whole kit and kaboodle as emergent - in a mutual, co-arising, fashion. So to the degree that you treat anything as foundational - like I-ness - we would have to disagree.

Consciousness is fundamental to all knowing. — Janus

No. Not unless here you are prepared to re-define consciousness - with all its embedded dualistic substance metaphysics - as the modelling relation itself. It is the modelling relation that is "fundamental" to all knowing.

Or in Peircean terms, it is the interpretant that is the most fundamental element of the sign relation. — Janus

Where does he argue for that?

I would say the "I-ness" is the fundamental fact upon which all other knowledge turns. It cannot be explained because it is the ground of all explanation. — Janus

So that is where we would differ then.

Of course our modeling of the world is inevitably dualistic in the sense that there are those two poles of explained and explainer, but there is a third element; the relation between the two poles: the explanation. So the unity of reality is really a trinity. — Janus

Well that is the semiotic position I take. And it serves to generalise this "I-ness" in a suitable fashion. The I-ness becomes as much a problem for physics as neuroscience. It becomes a generic issue of knowledge.

So again, there are two choices here. Either you take I-ness at face value - the face value it now has within our dualising culture which speaks of "consciousness" as some kind of ultimate substance. Or you instead step back to see this as the most general metaphysical issue of all - the dichotomy of the observer and the observable which has to be resolved in the pan-semiotic generality of a sign relation metaphysics.

You seem to be arguing for these two opposed approaches as if they were the same thing. One treats consciousness or experience as ineffably subjective - beyond inquiry. The other just gets on with building a meta-level objective theory - making it the subject of an inquiry.

I am just as absolutely certain that I am a linguistic being whose cognition is mediated by that fact, as I am that I see a blue sky. — Janus

So are you proposing that "absolute certainty" as a verifiable fact or not? Is your willingness to act in accordance with that belief the evidence required by the social construction involved?

There are two views in play here.

The naive realist just thinks linguistic framing can be stripped away to leave some kind of direct and unmediated phenomenology exposed, like the seabed after the tide has gone out. I am arguing - counter to that - that the best we can do is to ascend to a meta-linguistic frame in which there is now the self that is seen to have a linguistic framing wrapped around their raw animalistic consciousness.

This is why I would draw attention to the "I" that you mention as the being that is by turns, linguistic or experiential. This "I" that is suddenly so certain in an apparently direct and unmediated fashion.

Can you explain the presence of this "I-ness"? My explanation is that it is arises semiotically as part of the modelling relation. It is the necessary "other" to the construction of "the world". A naive realist, by contrast - as Banno continually demonstrates - just takes this "I" for granted. And so from there we wind up in all the confusions of Cartesian dualism and an idealist metaphysics of mind.

For example I am absolutely certain that I see a blue sky; belief simply doesn't enter into it. — Janus

This seems just like word play over definitions.

In my approach, it is all one process - a sign relation with the world, a modelling relation with the world. And so I don't really get this business of trying to chop things up into beliefs vs certainties vs whatevers. Sure we can emphasise different aspects of the whole process in our jargon, but it becomes word play to die in a ditch over unnecessarily disconnected definitions.

So here, is it your belief that the sky is blue? Is your certainty about what you will see if you check not the justification of this belief when propositionally framed?

To say belief simply doesn't enter into it is to make the point that when you are looking and seeing a blue sky, then there is a level at which you are modelling the world - the biological level of perception - which is clearly distinct from the linguistic level where you might be talking about the fact of this biological level of modelling.

Rightfully speaking, your belief would concern the fact that there is this "you", and it is experiencing certain qualia - namely a "sky" that is a certain general hue which you label "blue". But then - to sustain your point - you want to set all that linguistic framing aside and pretend there is only the naked experiencing of a blue sky with no doubt involved, and hence no belief either.

Which you should realise is a meta-cognitive position. It is the linguistic self imagining what it would be like to be a non-linguistic self, and then insisting in speech that it actually is just like that. You have adopted a model of the phenomenal self that you insist is the reality - despite knowing it to be a linguistically framed model of "raw feels with no believing involved".

As a form of denial, it is pretty elaborate.

if you studied the matter, you must at least be familiar with predator calls, which are entirely symbolic, — Pseudonym

Again, I'm not disputing that there are numerous borderline cases. And so the question then becomes, why a sudden and vast human difference?

It's an open question. I don't think that it has been adequately answered.

But we do know stuff like that the great apes can be taught vocabs of a few hundred words and yet vocab learning never "takes off" in the exponential fashion it does in infant Homo sapiens. And grammatical structure never becomes a natural habit in the easy and fluent fashion it does for all humans.

Likewise there was a fairly sudden transition to symbolic culture in Homo sapiens' history. The wearing of jewellery and the painting of caves. That picture has become muddied now that the evidence is shifting to credit Neanderthals with greater symbolic culture. But still, this is another pointer towards a genuine transition from a pre-abstract, pre-symbolic, pre-syntactic, animal condition to the full-blown, free and easy, human level of linguistic semiosis.

So what I am reacting against is the one note tone of your posts. You seem only concerned about minimising the scale of the evolutionary transition here. I agree that there is plenty of evidence of some continuity in regards to language use or symbolic thought. And indeed, animals are far closer than most people think once science looks in detail.

But then there is the other side to this debate - the fact that human language use and symbolic thought becomes as different as night and day. And that raises the question of exactly what explains the strength of this sharp difference? We need the further theory that accounts for that.

I'm happy to discuss the possible evolutionary mechanisms. But first we would have to move beyond the simplistic arguments based on there being an actual borderline where animals employ sign - and even employ it deceptively or counterfactually.

Yes, perhaps that surprises some. But then that use remains rooted in the here and now of an ecological context. Nothing has changed in a big way. It is only with humans that something explosive happens and sign becomes the tool of thought itself. We find ourselves in a different game.

Did you have an example of animal deception that involved abstract symbolism rather than indexical or iconic signs?

I am not arguing against borderline examples. I am setting out the nature of the difference.

Chimps of course get close to the use of private signs that are semi symbolic. One of de Waal’s chimps held out her hand clasped in the other as a begging motion. That is indexical going on symbolic in having a new element of ritual or repetition. But it didn’t catch on as a group symbol - syntactic structure with habitual meaning.

So again, I am familiar with the literature. Evolution of language was what I was studying about 35 years ago. If you have specific examples to discuss, bring them on.

Yes, I’m familiar with the literature thanks. My opinion is that you overstate your case.

Now you are talking about mental "objects" like feelings, intuitions, images, etc. You are conceptualising the mind as some kind of stage across which various kinds of actors come and go.

But does this really carve up the mind at its joints once you get into a systems-style understanding of neurocognition? Is there an imagery faculty, an intuition faculty, a feelings faculty, all making their individual contributions to the activity being witnessed in this theatre of conscious experience?

I think not. If our models of neurocognition can't rid us of this Cartesian theatre metaphor - this uber-representationalism - we have failed.

I agree, doubt is inherent within belief because we know that we are never beyond the possibility of mistake. But I think that what separates belief from similar mental content which is not belief, is the conviction that there is a low possibility of mistake. This conviction is tied up with temporal extension such that a longer period of time without mistake reinforces the conviction. — Metaphysician Undercover

So isn't this just pragmatism? You are now thinking of a belief as a proposition - a hypothesis that, if true, would have expectable consequences. You are breaking down the three-part method for forming a reasonable and justified belief - abduction, deduction, inductive confirmation - into its components and labelling the first bit, the leap to a hypothesis that makes predictions, as "the belief". And that separates it from "the justification".

Fair enough. And that goes to the disembodied way that linguistically-scaffolded humans can learn to speak about how they think. We can learn the trick of understanding "a state of believing" to devolve into these three essential steps. That is how we can objectify "what we believe", and the extent to which "it is justified", even to ourselves. We can point to the hypothesis, its expectable consequences, and the degree that our predictions are not false.

So all I say is that animals can't of course speak objectively in a way that clearly separates a belief from its justification. But the basic psychological structure is the same in that the brain is naturally wired up to work like that - to form general expectancies, to then make particular predictions, and then finally to revisit habits of belief when error correction becomes needed.

Checking further, there is this attempt at a pantheistic reading of Peirce....

ARTHUR W. BURKS - PEIRCE'S EVOLUTIONARY PRAGMATIC IDEALISM
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/43816/11229_2004_Article_BF00413590.pdf?sequence=1

Peirce, as a pantheist, thought God and the cosmos constituted one substance. To introduce his views we will trace the philosophic theme that runs through all four stages of his thought: the cosmos is an infinite semiotic goal-directed evolutionary process that converges on the good and the real....

...Peirce's evolutionary pragmatic idealism was a radically new form of pantheism. He replaced the theist's idea of a "one-shot" creation of the world by the gradual creation of the world through the evolutionary process of Tychism-Synechism-Agapism. He thought of cosmic evolution as a divine learning process. Chance, continuity, and cosmic purposes are all aspects of God, and we humans are parts of this infinite evolutionary divine system. ...

...When asked "Do you believe this Supreme Being to have been the creator of the universe?" he answered "Not so much to have been as to be now creating the universe",...

...Peirce's evolutionary pragmatic idealism is an evolutionary form of pantheism that operates in the opposite direction from emanationism and Spinozism. Whereas the latter theologies proceed from the highest level (God) on down through successively lower levels, Peirce's cosmic evolutionism begins at the simplest level of a random chaos of feelings and gradually improves under the guidance of final causality toward an infinite limit of perfection. Thus Peirce's pantheism is emanationism "turned upside down"...

Presumably she will not think 'they may or may not be there' but she will become just a tad more wary. — Janus

Like I replied to MU, do you think that beliefs can only speak of absolute certainties? If they are Bayesian expectations concerning probabilities then they are more accurate if they capture something true about the inherent uncertainties of life.

This again highlights a fundamental difference in metaphysical outlook. If you take a constraints-based view of ontology, like Peirce, then reality is inherently spontaneous or uncertain. It only become regular and predictable to the degree that unpredictability is regulated by habits, laws or past history.

So the argument is the world itself is inherently unpredictable (as quantum mechanics demonstrates at a fundamental physical level). And brains evolved to be Bayesian reasoning devices as that is the probabilistic logic - the constraints-based approach - which reflects the way the world itself works.

So the problem would be in believing "belief" to be deficient to the degree that it fails to speak with absolute definiteness about a world that is absolutely definite - the familiar position Banno takes in his naive realism.

Instead, we are in the contrary position where the world is inherently probabilistic and any entity seeking autonomous being through a modelling relation with that world would be wise to mirror the constraints-based probabilistic structure of that world. We wouldn't want to be doing information processing like an input-crunching computer, for instance.

So a gazelle would take a Bayesian approach - one that is "selfish" in terms of including its own needs in terms of a risk/reward assessment of waterhole safety.

If the lions are always there, but it is the only place to drink, then that is a problem that is going to have to be solved somehow - as the alternative is simply two different ways of dying.

The smartest thing to do is then to approach the waterhole in as wary a fashion as possible. If the gazelle had enough brains, it might be able to work out the best time is when the lions are just eating one of its friends. The sight of a pride of lions chowing down and occupied might become the basis of a new belief about when to approach a waterhole.

A counter example to uncertainty leading to wariness is the kind of behaviour that animals show when the world seems to present no recognised threat.

Check out lions in a zoo. It is damn near impossible to get them to notice you as a visitor standing outside the cage. Likewise in the wild where the presence of a human does not signal any kind of traditional threat - the story of the dodo.

The way the brain works, we don't even notice the world that doesn't matter. The fridge in the kitchen hums the whole time and we don't ever hear it. The hum may as well not exist. But when the hum suddenly stops - your power goes out perhaps - then suddenly that is a significant fact showing you did have some kind of running expectation about the noise being there after all.

So our beliefs have to be able to be accurately tuned to the way the world really is. And the way the world is can range from the continuous to the intermittent, from the possible to the certain, from the vague to the definite.

Propositional belief would seem to be a special class of belief in that context - belief that is somehow either absolutely right or wrong, and not merely constrained in its ambiguities or uncertainties. That is certainly how naive realists would go about it. But Pragmatism would say the world actually is probabilistic and so an accurate description of it would be accurate in terms of the objective ambiguity or uncertainty it can attach to any truth value.

And anticipation seems to have doubt inherent within it, so it doesn't seem to be consistent with belief either. — Metaphysician Undercover

So beliefs can't be weak and strong? Beliefs aren't by nature probabilistic and so held with various degrees of conviction? There is some "degree of doubt" that is inherent for good reason. It helps to know that we don't know as well as to be sure that we do know.

it would be better not to say that animals and pre-linguistic humans believe but that they associate and expect. — Janus

I agree that homing in on expectation makes the right distinction in that it then stresses the future-facing nature of a habit of belief.

So the animal mind is embodied in its ecological setting - carried along in an ever-unfolding present. And that means it is always in a state of expectation about what might happen next. Surprises reveal that its belief system needs updating.

And then symbolically displaced or abstracted human thought can lift itself out of this relentless flow of the present. We can form expectations that transcend their ties to the immediacy of our actual time and place. They can become propositional beliefs in that they are disconnected from our material state of being - the here and now of what we have to do to navigate our immediate physical circumstance - and now exist in the realm of the purely imaginary.

They are statements that can be shared with other selves, other minds. And statements that can relate even to ourselves in "other circumstances" - alternative realities.

I am really just arguing for the usefulness of distinctions between different kinds of believing in pre-linguistic and linguistic contexts. — Janus

A distinction would be useful. But making a sharp distinction is also really difficult as the linguistically structured human mind never actually abandons its non-linguistic animal roots. It just builds new floors on the old foundations.

So I sympathise with the project. It is one that I share. But you are coming up against the problem that animals are just animals, then humans are linguistically-structured - yet still, linguistically-structured animals.

It is like asking if animals have memories. Sure they do. But they have recognition memories and not recollective or autobiographical memories. They have memories that are ecologically embedded in the here and now - and so support recognition - rather than memories which are displaced in time and place via a socially-constructed notion of "being a self with a personal narrative."

So belief is more usefully the generic term - an umbrella term like memory. Then we would want to make a distinction that gets at a reliable experimental difference. I focus on recognition vs recollection as cogsci experiments reveal the vastly different "capacities" involved. We can recognise a truly vast variety of once seen slides. But we can only recall a dozen at best - and usually the first and last of a sequence of some thousands.

I haven't really thought about "belief" in that cogsci light. But there ought to be some similarly striking way to get at the difference between the "pure animal" form of the capacity and its "linguistically-structured human extra".

Anyway, my point is that most people just speak past the critical animal vs human mental difference. So we do need a distinction that picks out the difference. But then that distinction has to arise out of a scientific model of the situation. And that is the approach I try to follow.

if you happen to have a public link, kindly share. — Dzung

Actually the quote I was thinking of was misleading as it wasn't connected to his evolutionary cosmology but to the more mundane thing of how his Christian contemporaries view his "scandalous affair". Buddhism wouldn't be so judgemental.

I can't help thinking that the mother of Christianity, Buddhism, is superior to our own religion. (NEM III/2 p. 872)

So it was more that Eastern metaphysics was in the air in his time as something exotic, but not really studied.

Here is a more direct reference in terms of his evolutionary cosmology where he talks about its roots...

... tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind. I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies, that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord - I mean in Cambridge - at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds stricken with the monstrous mysticism of the East. [6.102]

Being aware of no symmetry from Peirce, I think if we still need to linger on it, we may want to analyze Synechism, not only Tychism. — Dzung

Yeah, I don't think Peirce said much about symmetry and symmetry-breaking principles. It was implicit rather than explicit at best.

Peirce had a Victorian level understanding of phase transitions and other physical manifestations of symmetry breaking. Group theory and its fundamentality in physics was a 20th century thing, after all.

It is symbolic language which enables abstraction — Janus

Yep, @Pseudonym is only talking about indexical or iconic semiosis here in regard to animal communication. Symbols are a whole different thing. Syntactical mechanism - an epistemic cut - displaces the meanings from the world being referenced.

Abstraction speaks to this step from the physically embodied situation - the emotional hoot and holler, or the friendly wag of the tail - to a second-order story where there is now a "self" in control of the "information".

If a dog could feign a happy tail wag in order to fool another dog so as to achieve some other purpose, then we would have the start of a symbolic or abstract level of semiosis.

But just wagging a tail out of engrained biological habit is merely an indexical level of sign. It indicates a mood that other dogs can reliably interpret. The dog does not have the self-hood that might mean this tail-wagging could conceal a further counterfactual surprise.

Are you suggesting that animals might imagine alternative scenarios? — Janus

No. I would agree they need linguistic structure to flesh out alternatives to that degree - scenarios in which they themselves feature as actors.

My point is that I wouldn't die in a ditch trying to defend some overly specific defintion of "belief". It is a generic kind of word.

So if an animal shows clear signs of being surprised, confused, taken aback, having to think again, then that is good enough for me to show that there was prior to that some reasonable inductive expectation in place in their mind.

And from the point of psychological theory, that way of processing the world is of fundamental importance. Animal neurobiology is set up just like the scientific method. By forming habits of anticipation, we can then ignore the world as much as possible and so insert "ourselves" into the equation as actors with freedoms.

This flips the usual Kantian representational view, or correspondence theories of truth, on their head. So it is important to emphasise this aspect of belief in animal cognition as it then confirms a Peircean continuity of nature when it comes to basic epistemic method. Brains already reason like scientists are meant to.

Cheryl Misak summed it up nicely in Truth and the End of Inquiry...

"It is important to remember that the constraint on belief imposed by experience is a negative one. The world affects our beliefs not by our finding out positive things about it, but rather, by providing recalcitrant or surprising things which upset an expectation produced by a belief. The role which the world plays is not one of providing something for our beliefs to correspond to, but rather, one of letting us know when we have a belief that conflicts with it."

Is there such a sharp distinction between syntax and semantics? — Banno

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Apparently.

Propositional' I would say means formulated as 'I believe that'; this way a belief is given a definite form. — Janus

Yes. I agree that language puts it out into a social space where there is then the further fact of the “I” that is doing the asserting.

But still, the guts of the issue for me is that a belief has this counterfactual structure.

the point at issue seems to be whether such believings are propositional — Janus

Well propositional just means that a belief can be asserted in a way that makes it true or false.

So if we leave out the asserting bit - which is where you definitely need linguistic structure - then we can see some degree of continuity between animals and humans in terms of holding beliefs open to falsification.

The animal has the semantics, if not the syntax. And that is where I would draw the sharp line.

The proposition could not be expressed in some timeless and placeless fashion. The belief is embodied. But I wouldn't deny the animal a semantic state that is counterfactual in nature.

If an animal looks surprised or puzzled, did it have a prelinguistic belief?

Surely a belief would be positively held if it can be revealed as an expectation which can be positively contradicted. That seems evidence enough it is held in a counterfactual fashion.

I would like to start with an inquiry on the above statement: specifically is it Peircean or not? I haven't found anywhere Peirce expressed atheism or the like. Or maybe I didn't follow you correctly. — Dzung

It is notoriously difficult to agree what Peirce actually believed about god or divinity. But he himself stressed he certainly did not follow any kind of orthodox view.

And my point there was that he definitely did not argue for an external creator with some mission in mind for mankind. Instead, he identified the divine with the vague ground of being - the Firstness of pure unformed potential. And so the Comos is a state of logical regularity that evolved into being in a purely self-creating fashion with no purpose in mind except to be "increasingly reasonable" in its lawfulness and organisation.

He did say he was more Buddhist on this score. :)