Re: [lojban] Set of answers encore

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 9/26/2001 3:49:43 PM Central Daylight Time, jcowan@reutershealth.com writes:

Your examples are thought-provoking, but unfortunately for you
tend to push me in the other way:  "believe" is just inherently a
fuzzy notion, I now think, and there's simply no way to draw
the line between "X believes p" and "X would believe p if he
had a clue" and "X will come to believe p if jogged a bit."

I think this misses the point a little:"had a clue" is way short of what epistemologists seem to want (indeed, they tend to go unconditional on this): "follows from what he believes" really does seem to be it.  And Idon't think there are any cases.  A more interesting contrast is between the ones we are willing to concede he knew all along once we get him tosay (or do) the appropriate thing and the ones that we insist he just figured out, even though the premises  were there all along. But basicallyI fall in with your next line:

<

In short, "{p | John believes p} is a prototypical category.
Prototype beliefs include "Aristarchus believed the
sun was at the center of the universe" and "I believe I have
money in my pocket", but what to do with "Jim (a mouse)
believes that Tom (a cat) will catch him and eat him" is a puzzlement.>

The answer seems to lie in Dennett's notion of a belief, that is, a behavioral category, more or less, plus some anthropomorphism: Jim behaves theway I would if I believed that and was Jim's size and savor -- and other faculties.

Dennett makes some distinction between beliefs and opinions,
which is not krici/jinvi, but if I understand it is about what
we act on vs. what we are willing to assent to:  Jim has
beliefs but not opinions (Mickey has both); I have both;
there are many more beliefs than opinions; almost all
beliefs are true, on pain of nonsurvival; opinions can be true
or false without very grave consequences much of the time.

Actually, when Dan is consistent (and coherent) he would admit that most believes may well be false but they fit together to give a good functional grasp of the world -- different falsehoods cancelling one another out, asit were.  He can be a fairly intelligible Pragmatist when pressed andnot on display (so, of course, what he means by true is something else again too -- I am translating).  this belief-opinion distinction is a nice one and worhty of Lojbanization, but I don't know just how to do it efficiently.

<> Suppose we
> did have a good indirect test for beliefs so that we could check out
> your belief about a jack-tax without calling the issue to your mind [...]


Shades of Smullyan's experimental epistemologist, whose machine
gives him access to the physiological correlates of people's brain
states.  With the machine, he knows whether or not something seems
red to you -- but he gets into trouble when he applies the machine
to his own mind, and learns that he may be going crazy.>

Ray likes to push stock characters to the extreme. I assume one aspect of his going crazy is that he thinks he can tell when something seems red to you or rather when someone may be going crazy.