[MD] JTB

[Ian Glendinning]

Steve, Matt,

Steve, you remake my point several times.
(I wasn't suggesting you didn't understand Matt ? This is not
personal. It's much more important than that.)

You keep talking about believing based on earlier experience, and
ignorance of intervening events, not current experience. That's just
NOT holding something to be true. All the person can really say is I'm
sure I HAD the money in my pocket. (Whatever loose natural language
they actually say in their heads or conversation.)

(Those cases the "truth" clearly is changing anyway .... so the nature
of the belief / truth relation is moot. Matt's use of the Bain's
different nature of different propositions is closer to what is
actually going on .... in the mind, as Matt reminds us ....  I'd bring
in Dennett's intentional work too, but this is not what I'm arguing
about here ...)

And it is not a matter of the "luxury" of pragmatic fuzziness Matt, it
is a matter of which factors matter. It's the "goodness" of the
"evidence" that matters, whether I call it belief or truth or not.

I would like to refine the precision (quality of knowledge) here as
much as you (I believe ;-) ) just don't want to waste the effort on
the choice of individual words - thought experiments that are really
word-games using the words truth and belief. (Spitting pedantic hairs
here would indeed be language all the way down, etc ...)

The distinction between belief and truth is real, just not "worth" it.
(The angels on the head of that pin, those deckchairs on a large
ocean-going means of transport ...)

The meta-interest (amazement & crushing disappointment) for me is
people still having these logical arguments about objects like $20
bills and pockets, instead of quality and value-based interactions
.... surely we MoQists must have learned that precision is NOT
achieved by logical objective arguments. Those arguments CHANGE the
VALUES of the objects, their terminology and their logical relations
during the process of arguing and inventing new word games. Come in Mr
Hofstadter. (or Matt's poetics would do me just as well in this
context.)

Ian

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Ian,
>
> Ian said:
> Believing Dave to be holding the Jack of Spades (with no particular
> reasonable evidence) is hoping or guessing that something might be
> true, not holding that something IS true.
>
> Matt:
> Yes, one can distinguish between "believing" and "hoping or guessing"
> in this way.  However, for the purposes of those who follow Bain's
> description of belief as a habit of action, this is not the case.  "Belief"
> in these cases becomes the propositional form of mental items.  This
> becomes hairy philosophy of mind, but the idea is that not all "mental
> items" are beliefs, some are desires or hopes (for example), but all
> desires and hopes can be explicated as beliefs ("I _believe that_ I
> desire...") thus putting it into terms where we can discuss
> propositional knowing-that. etc .... snipped.