[FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

Nick Thompson nickthompson at earthlink.net
Fri Sep 22 10:20:23 EDT 2017


All right.  I admit it.  I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about logic.  

Frank, can you help me out here?  My concession here was that in Peirce's world, the relation of belief to action is analytical .... i.e. arises directly from the definitions of terms.  I thought this was a big concession, because propositions that arise analystically aren't very interesting, and I was confessing to having said something not very interesting.  Unfortunately, this crowd does not want me to get a way EVEN with that concession.  

I was TRYING to write a tautology.  So I guess I should have written, "X is Y; therefore, X is Y.  Is THAT a tautology.   I know you have tried to explain this to me before. 

I have CLEARLY gotten myself WAY in over my head, here. 

Thanks, 

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of ?glen?
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2017 6:17 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia


On 09/21/2017 08:27 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> */[NST==> Is there any logic in which, “Let X be Y; therefore X is Y” 
> is not entailed.  If a belief is defined as that upon which one is 
> prepared to act, is there any logic in which acting does not imply 
> belief?  <==nst] /*

Of course.  E.g. modal logics allow different types of "therefore", say ⊨_a and ⊨_b.  Then it might be true that "Let X be Y  ⊨_a  X is Y" but false that "Let X be Y  ⊨_b  X is Y".  Similarly, I can imagine a logic where "be" and "is" mean different things.

> On 09/21/2017 05:00 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ wrote:
> Yes, of course.  E.g. Since most of my actions involve very tight feedback loops, something like tossing a ball to a friend can be launched and then I can make attempts to abort it if, say, I notice the friend has looked away.
> 
> */[NST==>Wouldn’t the best way to analyze this be as a series of 
> “micro” beliefs?  <==nst] /*

What is a "micro" belief?  The whole point of my response was that you are over-simplifying both belief and action in order to tell a "just so story" and force the story to fit your philosophy.  It seems reasonable to me that if actions are decomposable, then so would be beliefs because there's no difference between beliefs and actions.

But you are saying something different.  Somehow, to you, beliefs are different from actions.


> */[NST==>I think a body can enact conflicting beliefs at the same 
> time, but that is because I am comfortable with the idea that that the 
> same body can simultaneously act on two different belief systems.  CF 
> Freud, slips of the tongue, hysteria, etc.  Frank will correct me. /*

You're implying that, although bodies are composite, belief systems are unitary.  If the same body can do 2 conflicting things, why can't the same belief system be composed of 2 conflicting things?  This is why I raised the idea of paraconsistent, defeasible, and higher order logics.  Specifically _those_ types.

Why do you treat belief systems as fundamentally different from physical systems?

--
␦glen?

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