Re: Belief
Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2023 9:48 am
How do you know what others experience and know? Can't you be content to just not know yourself? Why all these beliefs about other people?
How do you know what others experience and know? Can't you be content to just not know yourself? Why all these beliefs about other people?
Yes, noted, good point.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 9:48 amHow do you know what others experience and know? Can't you be content to just not know yourself? Why all these beliefs about other people?
Well,…
"Some philosophers have denied the existence of beliefs altogether. Advocates of this view, generally known as eliminativism, include Churchland (1981), Stich (in his 1983 book; he subsequently moderated his opinion), and Jenson (2016). On this view, people’s everyday conception of the mind, their “folk psychology”, is a theory on par with folk theories about the origin of the universe or the nature of physical bodies. And just as our pre-scientific theories on the latter topics were shown to be radically wrong by scientific cosmology and physics, so also will folk psychology, which is essentially still pre-scientific, be overthrown by scientific psychology and neuroscience once they have advanced far enough.
According to eliminativism, once folk psychology is overthrown, strict scientific usage will have no place for reference to most of the entities postulated by folk psychology, such as belief. Beliefs, then, like “celestial spheres” or “phlogiston”, will be judged not actually to exist, but rather to be the mistaken posits of a radically false theory. We may still find it convenient to speak of “belief” in informal contexts, if scientific usage is cumbersome, much as we still speak of “the sun going down”, but if the concept of belief does not map onto the categories described by a mature scientific understanding of the mind, then, literally speaking, no one believes anything."
Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/