Le 26-déc.-06, à 23:59, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit :
I regard the idea of "believing" to be unsound, because it is a pre-Freudian concept, which assumes that each person has a "single self" that maintains beliefs.
Is this not a bit self-defeating? It has the form of a belief. Now I can still agree, it depends of the meaning of "single self".
A more realistic view is that each person is constantly switching among various different "ways to think" in which different assertions, statements, or bodies of knowledge keep changing their status, etc.
In that case I can completely agree. Even by modeling a machine's belief by formal provability Bp by that machine, in the ideal case of the self-referentially correct machine, like Peano Arithmetic, it will follow that the "ontically equivalent" modalities Bp & p, Bp & Dp, etc. obeys different logics so that they embodies different epistemological status (and they are easy to confuse). Now, when we are building a (meta)theory of "belief" we have to stick on some possible sharable belief (in number theory, computer science, perhaps physics: all that will depend on the hypotheses we accept) and build from it. If not we could fall in exaggerated relativism.
Accordingly our "sets of beliefs" can include many conflicts--and in different mental contexts, those inconsistencies may get resolved in different ways, perhaps depending on one's current priorities, etc.
OK. I would say that if someone can acknowledge the existence of a conflict between beliefs, then he/she/it does acknowledge implicitly that he/she/it bets on some *self*-consistency. If not he/she/it could just accept its contradictory beliefs without further thoughts.
Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
