Re: [Critical-Realism] Causal de-onts: a thought experiment?

["Ruth Groff" <RGroff1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tobin,

Glad you didn't find me pissy.  It's been a bad week.

You wrote:
I really don't see how something that in fact you don't know can itself be a 
belief.  So I don't believe that I can believe that ignorance is a species of belief.  Believe you me!

We got to this, I think, because you were wondering if the absence of a belief about x is a different sort of cause than is a true or false belief about x.  I guess what hangs on this is that one might want to say that true or false beliefs are "things" that are present, whereas having no belief about something is a "thing" that is absent (an ideational de-ont?).  

What I was saying is that the absence of a belief x, say, just *IS* constitutive of some belief-state n, which - as it happens - doesn't involve having belief x, in contrast to some other belief-state.  But belief states are causal in the particular sense that they are, it seems to me, as a kind.  

As an aside, certainly the absence of a belief x is not itself a proposition.  I don't think that I'm prepared to equate what I've been calling "belief-states" with sets of propositions, either; I think consciousness comes in more forms than that.  The phrase "belief-state" is misleading in this regard -- should be something more general, like "subjective state."

Now, it might be that reasons, in particular, as one form, or instance, of consciousness, are indeed efficacious in some way that is different in kind (and not just in  effectiveness) from other things that comprise a subjective state.  In which case perhaps you could, in fact, parse it such that the absence of a belief is efficacious in a qualitatively different sense than is a true or false belief.  But it would be the fact that it's something other than a belief, something more diffuse, that would account for this, not it's being "an absence" (sic).

I think that's what I think, anyway.

r.

  

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