From jcowan@reutershealth.com Thu Sep 27 09:28:20 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_4_1); 27 Sep 2001 16:27:06 -0000 Received: (qmail 20170 invoked from network); 27 Sep 2001 16:27:05 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by 10.1.1.221 with QMQP; 27 Sep 2001 16:27:05 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2 with SMTP; 27 Sep 2001 16:28:20 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/Pro-8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA14999; Thu, 27 Sep 2001 12:29:50 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <3BB35393.4030205@reutershealth.com> Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 12:28:03 -0400 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20010913 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: pycyn@aol.com Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Set of answers encore References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan pycyn@aol.com wrote: > Well, ideally, ask him "Is Bill the cube root of 389017 years old?" I > would count "Say what?" or "I have no idea what the cube root of > whatever you said is" and so on as effective "no"s , indicating that > such was not his belief. In _Quiddities_, Quine says that people believe what they are willing to bet money on, so as to be able to reasonably distinguish belief from mere lip service -- although even he concedes that "I know that my Redeemer liveth" is not a good candidate for this kind of belief-test. It would seem that he agrees with me that "belief" is a prototype-based category, although he counts that bad, whereas I reckon it good. -- Not to perambulate || John Cowan the corridors || http://www.reutershealth.com during the hours of repose || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan in the boots of ascension. \\ Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel