tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post5101132493780826706..comments2023-10-28T08:48:37.400-07:00Comments on emerson hall problems: When is ‘seeming to see’ enough?Sharon Berryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-85526496714309902452007-03-20T19:53:00.000-07:002007-03-20T19:53:00.000-07:00wow this is definately a seductive view, and I lik...wow this is definately a seductive view, and I like your reading of carnap (way to get around the no-objective-way-to-determine-what-someone's-framework-propositions-are problems in the carnap vs. quine debate!)<BR/><BR/>but a) are you really saying that religious people are only being irrational *relative to our arbitrary conventions about how to represent them, what inferences to allow*? and<BR/>b) I worry a little that this kind of radical conventionalism/skepticism about rationality might be self undermining, <BR/><BR/>p.s. did you hear that carnap went around doing drugs naked in the forest as a younger man? Or that quine made him cry by calling him a metaphysician? It seems like he was your kind of guy in a number of ways :)Sharon Berryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17434076853502881274noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-74958945484698019092007-03-18T01:40:00.000-07:002007-03-18T01:40:00.000-07:00Ohh crap I forget to finally answer the question.U...Ohh crap I forget to finally answer the question.<BR/><BR/>Ultimately the answer is just that it depends on context. When we ask about whether I am justified in believing there is a table in the room the background corpus lets us assume that the external world is not a masterful trick. When we ask about brain in the vat cases the context shifts and that is no longer part of the allowed corpus. Though in my opinion I don't think there IS anything to the belief in the external world than that almost everyone has experiences consistent with it's existence (no experiences of being in out of vat world).<BR/><BR/>Things like experiencing that god exists don't cut it as justification for god's existence because our normal context would demand that we model the info as 'I experienced the feeling that god existed' and we don't assume in the standard background corpus rules that take us from feeling that such and such to such and such when it isn't a traditional perceptual experience.<BR/><BR/>Ultimately though I'm not convinced there is a real question here and it isn't just terminology.TruePathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12167366567189261911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2969036261739013200.post-85720003937912099442007-03-18T01:25:00.000-07:002007-03-18T01:25:00.000-07:00Talk about (belief) rationality presupposes a mode...Talk about (belief) rationality presupposes a model of the individual as directly receiving some sorts of perceptual/experiential input and then somehow reasoning with them. This requires that we somehow generate a model of the individual where certain sorts of things we chalk up as input (perceptual experiences) and other things we leave in the realm of judgement.<BR/><BR/>This division is a choice we make as determined by context and I think a simple example illustrates this point. Let's consider an eminent scientist reading a argumentatively flawed scientific paper concludes that the conclusion is correct. Is this a rational belief for him to have? Well if we consider his evidence to be merely the facts he read in the paper then no, the argument is flawed and they don't establish the conclusion. On the other hand if we allow the experience he has of judging this to be a convincing argument to count as part of his input than (assuming the details of the flawed argument have passed from his memory) his general accuracy may justify believing that the result is valid.<BR/><BR/>In other words we have a theoretical notion of does a certain set of facts justify (perhaps relative to some implied background knowledge/inference rules) some conclusion. When we assesses whether it is rational for someone to believe something or not we (from context) infer some set of data to be taken as the individuals given information. Then using this model we can then answer whether it would be rational for them to believe the proposition.<BR/><BR/>Really of course the individual just has a series of experiences, some having content but the notion of rationality asks us to model them a certain way and certain vague rules of thumb and contextual clues tell us what choices we should make in constructing the model. This, by the way, is the brilliance of Carnap's understanding of philosophy and what so many people don't follow in his debates with Quine. Carnap understood that rather than answering real questions about the world when we ask whether someone is rational we are merely asking questions about a certain sort of mental model and the choices we make in constructing that model affect our answers.<BR/><BR/>One more example might be constructive. Suppose it turns out that from the entire sequence of events that you could remember if asked (including childhood memories and the like) it would be possible to predict that contrary to meteorological predictions it will rain tomorrow. We still wouldn't say (in a normal context) that it would be rational for you to believe it would rain tomorrow. That's because we don't accept the model where you get to reason with EVERY event you could possibly call to mind as acceptable in this context. On the other hand it isn't what you actually remember that determines the information we include in the model. In truth when someone reads even a fairly short scientific paper at any one time they will not remember all the details but we don't let them get away with being rational on the virtue of having the experience 'I remember that the paper seemed right.'<BR/><BR/>Perhaps to be a little more specific I should say that when we ask if it is rational for someone to believe something in a given situation we really are looking to see if there is any reasonable model of their information that lets them validly reach the conclusion. It is not that we exclude any particular piece of a huge long sequence of memories they might have just that we don't find the model that takes all of those to be their information to be reasonable.TruePathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12167366567189261911noreply@blogger.com