[FRIAM] better simulating actual FriAM

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

OK, so what if I believe x, and I believe y and I believe that beliefs x+y
entail z? Then I believe z, right?  But do we want to say that I believe z
BECAUSE I believed x and y?  Entailment never "entails" belief unless I
believe in the laws of logic, right?  For some reason I want to reserve
"cause" for the situation which believing y and believing that x+y entails
z, I came to believe z because I came to believe x.  

I am plainly out of my depth, here.   I mean, even more than usual.  We need
a logician, or 4 years at St. Johns, or both.  I think that a logician
consultant would say -- wearily -- that Nick wants to limit the word cause
to "efficient" causes, that experimental psychologists tend to do that, etc.
So then the question becomes, is the causality asserted when I say that the
snifter broke because I left it on the table when I went to bed AND the cat
knocked it off the table while  eating the dip from last night's party the
same causality as I might assert if I said that the snifter broke BECAUSE it
was brittle.  And is the causality that we assert when we assert sidewise
causality -- a sequence of events -- in any way related to the causality
that we assert when we assert upward or downward causality.  

Glen has offered, and EricS has endorsed, a work-around for all this mess
which I have yet to understand.  Really, I shouldn't speak to this issue any
more before I have another go at their messages, which I attach.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2020 6:07 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] better simulating actual FriAM

What about something being believably prior rather than just temporally
prior? Perhaps, we would use a different word than cause?



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