[FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

[Eric Smith]

Somehow I imagine that Nick means to say there are costly signals in this game — that motor action is thicker than conversation or reflection.

If I am walking across a snowfield that I know to be filled with crevasses, and I know I can’t tell which snow holds weight and which doesn’t, my movement is really different than it is putting my feet on the floor beside the bed in the morning.

To take a different example that is counterfactual but easier to use in invoking the real physiological paralysis, if Thank God Ledge on halfdome were not actually a solid ledge, but a fragile bridge, or if there had been a rockfall that left part of it missing and I were blindfolded, or if I were a prisoner of pirates blindfolded and made to walk the plank, my steps would land differently than they do when I get out of bed in the morning.

There I didn’t say what anyone else would do in any circumstance, but did claim that my own motions have different regimes that are viscerally _very_ distinct.  I’m not sure I can think about whether I would fight for air when being drowned.  It might be atavistic and beyond anything I normally refer to as “thought”.  I certainly have had people claim to me that that is the case.

Those distinctions may occupy a different plane than the distinction between reasonableness and dogmatism all in the world of conversation and the social exchange.

But I should not speak for others.  Only for myself as a spectator.

Eric




> On Sep 21, 2017, at 4:32 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> No regrets or apology are needed.  And even if we are about to "argue about words" ... I forget what famous dead white guy said that ... it's still useful to me.
> 
> You say: "if one acts in the assurance that some fact is the case, one cannot be said to really doubt it"  The answer is clarified by reading Marcus' post.  If you act with assurance, then you're not open to changing your mind.  So, you've simply moved the goal posts or passed the buck.
> 
> I *never* act with assurance, as far as I can tell.  Every thing I do seems plagued with doubt.  I can force myself out of this state with some activities.  Running more than 3 miles does it.  Math sometimes does it.  Beer does it.  Etc.  But for almost every other action, I do doubt it.  So, I don't think we're having the discussion James and Peirce might have.  I think we're talking about two different types of people, those with a tendency to believe their own beliefs and those who tend to disbelieve their own beliefs.
> 
> Maybe it's because people who act with assurance are just smarter than people like me?  I don't know.  It's important in this modern world, what with our affirmation bubbles, fake news, and whatnot.  What is it that makes people prefer to associate with people whose beliefs they share?  What makes some people prefer the company of people different from them?  Etc.
> 
> 
> On 09/21/2017 01:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> I am afraid this discussion is about to dissolve into a quibble about the meaning of the words "doubt" and "belief", but let's take it one more round.    In my use of the words ... and I think Peirce's ... one can entertain a doubt without "really" having one.  Knowledge of perception tells us that every perceived "fact" is an inference subject to doubt and yet, if one acts in the assurance that some fact is the case, one cannot be said to really doubt it, can one?   It follows, then, that to the extent that we act on our perceptions, we act without doubt on expectations that are doubtable.  
>> 
>> Eric Charles may be able to help me with this:  there is some debate between William  James and Peirce about whether the man, being chased by the bear who pauses at the edge of the chasm, and then leaps across it, doubted at the moment of leaping that he could make the jump.  I think James says Yes and Peirce says No.  If that is the argument we are having, then I am satisfied we have wrung everything we can out of it.  
>> 
>> Anyway.  I regret being cranky, but I can't seem to stop.  Is that another example of what we are talking about here?  
> 
> -- 
> ☣ gⅼеɳ
> 
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