Belief

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Are you saying that everything that is necessarily true can be proven? Can you prove that you have a gut feeling? It is true isn't it? Only you know that it is. But how do you prove that it really is?

Ferchmyjunk, as I said to you before, take a look at the conversation we had. It was in August and September. I probably posted literally hundreds of times on this topic - many of which were addressed directly to you. You'll find my perspective there.

Originally posted by twhitehead
It would take quite a lot of writing that I am not prepared to do today. I am not even sure I could articulate it all. But it is knowledge that I have.

I easily translate your post. Doesn't look good for you.

originally posted by LemonJello

As should have been obvious enough, 'deliberative' in my original claim denotes the involvement of deliberation. There are, of course, different flavors of deliberation. One can deliberate about what to do, evaluating practical reasons in relation to action-guiding. One can deliberate about what descriptively is the case, evaluating theoretical reasons in relation to propositional truth. We should be concerned here with the latter, inasmuch as belief is a propositional attitude wherein one takes some proposition to be true, or at least likely true beyond a certain level of credence. First thing to note here: even if such a state of deliberation implies intentional effort to focus one's cognitive efforts,** there's nothing conceptually indicating that the outcome of such effort is of one's choosing. This alone should be sufficient to clear up whatever misconception plagued your thinking on this: there need not be any inconsistency in claiming that a deliberative product is not within one's control.
Who said that applying the will guarantees the desired result? And why are you slamming solid walls of text at me that contain only simple points? Is your style here, especially since it includes insult, intended as a point in itself?

‘Verisimilitude’ in a restricted, technical sense is a philosophical concept dealing with various interpretations of truth as a coarse-grained property. I am using the term here in a more general sense, in the sense of being verisimilar. And 'verisimilar' means having the appearance of truth. So, I am talking about the appearance of truth as the outcome of one's cognitive processing. There's a reason why I would choose this phrasing, since I think it tends to elicit some apt perceptual analogs. Compare, for example, visual processing. One can choose to engage in a visual processing event and, say, exert control in focusing one's eyes in a particular direction with the intention to make out what is there. But, of course, that control does not generally extend to the end result of that event. Even if one makes an intentional effort to see what is there, the result is not a matter of choosing what one sees there but rather a matter of one's seeing what's there on a basis of being thusly appeared to. Well, I’m claiming something similar about belief. One can choose, say, to engage in deliberation about what is the case, but that control does not generally extend to belief outcomes. Just as what one ends up seeing is handcuffed to visual appearance as the outcome of perceptual processing, what one ends up believing is handcuffed to the appearance of truth as the outcome of cognitive processing. Just as the perceptual processing provides sensory representation of our surroundings, in providing beliefs, the cognitive processing is providing a type of mental representation. Think about why a standard view of belief is as a representation. A representation is such that it stands in for something else, either as a likeness or in specific virtue of something external to itself. Our mental representations are not our own unconstrained creative projects, they are strongly bound to how external things present themselves to us and generally result from our being thusly presented to.
And yet we still can decide for ourselves what justifications to use as our cognitive processes get all busy cognitively processing.

LemonJello, I would like to like you, but if all your intelligence and education leaves you unable to talk to us lesser people, than what use is it?

Originally posted by FMF
Ferchmyjunk, as I said to you before, take a look at the conversation we had. It was in August and September. I probably posted literally hundreds of times on this topic - many of which were addressed directly to you. You'll find my perspective there.

I have never asked you whether you can prove that 'you having a gut feeling' is true. So I only have two questions for you with which you only need to answer yes or no.

1. Is it true that you have a gut feeling? Yes/No?
2. Can you prove it? Yes/No?

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
I have never asked you whether you can prove that 'you having a gut feeling' is true. So I only have two questions for you with which you only need to answer yes or no.

1. Is it true that you have a gut feeling? Yes/No?
2. Can you prove it? Yes/No?

We've already talked the hind legs off this one. Unless you have some new angle or insight to offer, I'm simply going to refer you back to our previous conversations.

Originally posted by apathist
originally posted by LemonJello
As should have been obvious enough, 'deliberative' in my original claim denotes the involvement of deliberation. There are, of course, different flavors of deliberation. One can deliberate about what to do, evaluating practical reasons in relation to action-guiding. One can deliberate about what descriptiv ...[text thankfully shortened]...

Originally posted by apathist
"And why are you slamming solid walls of text at me that contain only simple points? Is your style here, especially since it includes insult, intended as a point in itself?"

You've heard of the phase "you've been Tangoed", well you've just been "Jelloed"
😛

Originally posted by FMF
We've already talked the hind legs off this one. Unless you have some new angle or insight to offer, I'm simply going to refer you back to our previous conversations.

Talked the hind legs off a question that I have never asked you. Typical copout as usual.

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Talked the hind legs off a question that I have never asked you. Typical copout as usual.

Can you prove that either of these claims you are making are "absolute" or "universal" truths? 😛

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk to FMF
So do you still maintain that you can't decide whether something is believable or not?

Why would he have changed this belief? Do you think that your posting exchanges may have somehow altered FMF's beliefs?

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Also I believe that even if something is 'convincing' we have the ability to reject it.

Yes, this is very clear from your posting style here at RHP. In fact it is a comment which is reflective of an underlying mindset of many of the religious posters here.

Originally posted by apathist
originally posted by [b]LemonJello

As should have been obvious enough, 'deliberative' in my original claim denotes the involvement of deliberation. There are, of course, different flavors of deliberation. One can deliberate about what to do, evaluating practical reasons in relation to action-guiding. One can deliberate about what descriptiv ...[text shortened]... r intelligence and education leaves you unable to talk to us lesser people, than what use is it?

If you didn't want the details of my view, then you shouldn't have bothered to ask. It's not surprising to me that you have no substantive response because, let's be honest, your first jab at my position was totally disingenuous. If you were genuinely interested in some clarification, you would have simply asked in kind. But you didn't simply ask for clarification. You sloppily redescribed my view using equivocation to make it look self-contradictory for a cheap rhetorical punch. Anyone who can read can plainly see that I never made the totally daft claim that something makes deliberative belief formation non-deliberative. Was your style there, especially since it embeds insult, intended as a point in itself?

Originally posted by divegeester
Yes, this is very clear from your posting style here at RHP. In fact it is a comment which is reflective of an underlying mindset of many of the religious posters here.

If you are not a religious poster then what are you?

Originally posted by apathist
originally posted by [b] DeepThought
...belief formation must involve the proposition being believable to you.
That is circular. But I think I agree. There is a feedback process involved.

When one makes a judgement one is not exercising free will. ...
I agree with the rest of that paragraph, but not with this. We are not logic machines. We get to choose what justifications we will accept when we make judgements.[/b]

No, I don't agree that it's circular. That something is believable does not entail that I must believe it. I should probably have used the word plausible. But if something is implausible then I'm not going to believe it, unless the matter is of some importance and subsequent investigation shows that the subject has counter-intuitive properties.

Can we choose which justifications we regard as plausible? Essentially what you've argued is that we choose what we find plausible, but plausibility is a function of experience, education and so forth. We produce an instant instinctive response, in so far as free will is involved it can only involve training our instincts in advance.

Originally posted by DeepThought
No, I don't agree that it's circular. That something is believable does not entail that I must believe it. I should probably have used the word plausible. But if something is implausible then I'm not going to believe it, unless the matter is of some importance and subsequent investigation shows that the subject has counter-intuitive properties.

Can ...[text shortened]... ponse, in so far as free will is involved it can only involve training our instincts in advance.

Would you say that everything that is true is provable? Also, is a belief only justified if you can prove its legitimacy to everyone? Or can some beliefs be justified without proof?

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Would you say that everything that is true is provable? Also, is a belief only justified if you can prove its legitimacy to everyone? Or can some beliefs be justified without proof?

One of these sentences is true, whichever one it is, it is not provable:

There is a God.
There is not a God.

Justification is not proof, if I can prove some proposition true then the proof provides justification. I don't think that the justification need necessarily be at the level of proof. If you saw someone lying down with their eyes closed you would be justified in thinking they were asleep. I don't think that you could be said to have proved they are asleep as they could be acting. To prove they were asleep then you'd need to connect them to an electroencephalogram to see what their brain was doing. So here we have a belief, that the person is sleeping, a justification, that they appear to be sleeping, and a potential confounder, the possibility they are feigning sleep. Despite the confounder you can reasonably claim to know the sleeper is asleep for the purposes of not disturbing them. In that scenario, we can ignore the confounder. Connecting them to an electrocardiogram for the purposes of improving a knowledge claim seems unreasonable. In a different scenario one may want a more rigorous justification.