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

["Dave Taylor" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tobin and Ruth

>I really don't see how something that in fact you don't know can itself be
a 
belief. 

This discussion seems to miss the points that one can not know that one
knows, and can know that one cannot know.  

In normal usage, KNOWLEDGE is what can be conclusively established (e.g. by
personal encounter) and can be reliably believed.   BELIEF is what has not
been conclusively established (e.g. because it rests on hearsay, which is
known to be necessarily the case with historical events) and so can only be
more or less reliably believed, based on the conjunction of internal
consistency of the source, related facts, and the results of experiments
(including thought experiments) on how they work out in practice.  Though
one does not have to go so far as Hume in limiting the field of knowledge to
our own perceptions, he was right that a great deal of what we take for
scientific knowledge is in fact merely more or less well-founded belief.

One BELIEVES something (whether or not it involves knowing) when one acts
ACTS as if it were true/reliable: not necessarily externally, but in how one
INTERPRETS what one is observing and/or which is the context one is
transforming.  In any particular case, belief is a universal: a way of
interpeting.  

Given that the brain works by channelling energy down nerves, belief can be
seen to be embodied as groups of nerves stem which feed many branches
relevant to particular pieces of knowledge derived from encounters with
reality: both as to how they are seen/classified and how objects so
classified are transformed. The belief may or may not be derived from
remembered sources of knowledge.  If the "belief" stem is absent there is
nothing to relate/tie together the bits of knowledge.  If a particular
belief stem is missing it is not possible to tie the bits together and
thereby coordinate action in that particular fashion.  

But we do coordinate our actions after a (not always satisfactory) fashion,
so particular belief stems x are inevitably members of a wider set (an only
partially coordinated group) of groups of belief stems: an overall "belief
state".  To say an absense "exists" is in set theory equivalent to saying
the null set exists, even if its contents don't; applying set theory to the
generation of numbers it is to say that 0 is a number.  If a particular term
in an equation is 0 that does affect the result. 

Ruth, I think this analysis reaches more or less the same point you end up
with: belief being more a matter of form than proposition.  What I do
suggest is that attention to how causes operate in the brain is more "CR"
than labelling the situation "subjective", which though it hints at the
operation of the brain, isn't sufficiently unambiguous and specific. 
    

-----Original Message-----
From: critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:critical-realism-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ruth
Groff
Sent: 13 December 2007 06:39
To: Continuation of the Spoon Bhaskar List
Subject: Re: [Critical-Realism] Causal de-onts: a thought experiment?

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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