7 ms·

So in short: if you are being truly logical, every statement of fact is just a statement of belief, it seems.

by 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago

briefcomment 7y ago
Yes. Another way of looking at it is that there are no first principles.
- KingMachiavelli 7y ago
  And a similar concept to this is that given a set of accepted axioms, two parties should always come to the same conclusion if both parties are behaving rationally. All debates are at best disagreements of accepted premises and definitions. It's a important concept to remember for anyone who's argumentative/legalistic since understanding the oppossing sides definitions and desired conclusion is often the cause for disagreement. If there are no first principles, then there are no definitive last principles.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    An entertaining related concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem Also, in some ideal sense, since we attain consciousness as pure minds untainted by experience, tabula rasa, all that follows is the result of sense information on the network. The concept of individuality is weak. Two pure minds, fully rational and capable of honest communication, can be different by having different sense information, but if they are able to communicate with each other they should, in time, be identical. i.e. once I have given you everything I know completely and you have given me everything you know completely, we are not distinct, you and I are the same. A full mind meld. We can't do this for all sorts of reasons, but two AGIs truly meeting may, which means that there is a sort of greyness to this true meeting of AGIs: by meeting they achieve unity. All AGIs behaving in this manner then become the same purely by meeting. Interesting.
    - rocqua 7y ago
      This makes total sense, because of the assumption of common priors. Drop that assumption, and fully rational people can indeed agree to disagree. This is a large part of why rational people can look at the same evidence, and come to different conclusions.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        > This makes total sense, because of the assumption of common priors. That's the Wiki article, yes. But scarejunba is going past that, to something more fundamental. If you have "pure minds untainted by experience, tabula rasa", then you remove the issue of priors. No longer is there any matrix of prejudices that have to agree. You start with observations about the world and logic, and nothing else, and everyone ends up in agreement. (To an extent you might bootstrap with priors, but over time you'd use observations and logic to replace them, especially when they disagree with someone else you're debating.)
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        smallnamespace 7y ago
        This seems unworkable because it ignores the role instincts have in living things, which are prior beliefs about the world put immediately into action. For example, an infant has an instinct to breathe right after birth. Is that a belief or an action? It’s both—a strategy to survive in the world encoded in genes attached to an implicit belief. An infant that tries to breathe two minutes later would suffer hypoxia and brain damage, while one that tries sooner will choke. There is no pure tabula rasa untainted by priors, as soon as you acknowledge minds are embedded in bodies shaped by millions of years of evolution and steeped in survival tactics, and what are tactics except a set of useful priors about good actions?
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        Things your body does don't have to be integrated into the priors you use when performing logic. But "You need to breathe." and things like that would be the easiest priors to replace with observational data.
- psychoslave 7y ago
  > Another way of looking at it is that there are no first principles. Is that part of the principles you adhere to? :)
dntbnmpls 7y ago
Yep. It's like the God problem. If God created the universe, then who created God? If another God created God, then who created that God. Ad infinitum. Or you can just ignore the exhausting issue altogether by claiming it is axiomatic. It's the same with any logical statement. You could go all the way up to the premises and question that and when given a proof of the premises, then you can question the premises of the "proof of the premises". Ad infinitum. Or you just take the axiomatic approach. I think most of life is lived axiomatically.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  This is correct, but a lot of people derive and indefensible conclusion from it. The real insight is that any belief in an axiom is an exercise in faith. A scientist who fails to recognise the role of faith in their beliefs commits the same error as a religious person who fails to recognise the role of faith in their beliefs.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    This is a common argument, and it is a form of argument by dictionary definition, which are seldom informative, and most often used to avoid the issues. While individual scientists may hold beliefs that go beyond scientific premises, the significant difference between scientific and religious belief is that in the former case, all axioms are considered to be defeasible - and they quite often are overthrown.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      The foundational axioms of scientific practice are generally not considered to be defeasible at all. The axioms of any particular theory or field may also be considered entirely beyond reproach. This is also not a semantic argument at all. It is strictly a logical one.
  - specialist 7y ago
    Please humor me. Trying to articulate a half-baked notion. A close relative went from marine biologist to creationist (et al), and I've been struggling to accept the change. My Calvinist self still doesn't understand Evangelic system of faith. -- Given Structure + Process => Outcomes: Scientist: Faith in processes, eg scientific method. Belief is based on reproducibility. Evangelical: Faith in outcomes. The book (authority) is used to rationalize (justify) proclamations of belief. To your point: Yes, both have "faith", but with different starting points and emphasis.
SarikayaKomzin 7y ago
Indeed. This is why it often seems like anything built up rationally can be tore down rationally. This leads some to the interesting (and perhaps terrifying) conclusion that narratives are more important and useful than rationalism. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre “ According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos.[23][24] As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question.” Perhaps whatever is useful is oftentimes more important than what is true.
- eb3c90 7y ago
  >“ According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos.[23][24] As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question.” > >Perhaps whatever is useful is oftentimes more important than what is true. There has been an ongoing debate in the UK about proportional representation and the first past the post system. It has not, as yet, lead to violence and chaos. So I think that the link Maistre identifies between questioning the status quo and chaos is not always true. Admittedly there is time and place for debate. You don't argue about the cars direction, when the driver is trying to concentrate in a dangerous situation.
  - SarikayaKomzin 7y ago
    Yeah. I shared that quote as an example of the “terrifying” conclusions this good lead one to, not necessarily because I though his reactionary stance was true (or useful, haha). But maybe the success of representative democracy is not based in rationalism but instead the mythology around individual liberty.
    - 7y ago
cwojno 7y ago
100% this. Most people do NOT realize this when engaged in normal conversation nor while in philosophical debates.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  That's just like, your opinion, man.
abtinf 7y ago
Humans require food and water to live. You might evade that fact as a mere belief, but you cannot escape the consequences of such an approach.
- normalnorm 7y ago
  What are the consequences? Have you ever experienced them yourself?
guerrilla 7y ago
No, this is not the conclusion that analytic epistemology has come to. Have a look at coherentism, foundationalism and reliabalism for example. The view you describe is skepticism and is held by a very small minority of modern philosophers. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/
- scarmig 7y ago
  Counterargument: skepticism is kind of boring compared to the other positions. There's just not much to build on if you flatly reject the ability to build things. People who're inclined to take that route are likely to avoid modern philosophy, so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers.
  - guerrilla 7y ago
    Or you could take a look at the references and the corpus and see that there are strong arguments against it instead of just guessing with no data. Analytic philosophers don't tend to build things anyway. They focus more on answering specific questions. There are plenty of "continental" philosophers who still do and many in fact have no problem with this.
  - paganel 7y ago
    You're assuming "building things" will bring us closer to getting to know the world a little better (or its essence), that might be false. > so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers I'm not a philosopher myself but I found Heraclitus's writings (Democritus's, too) a lot more interesting than many philosophers' writings from the 20th century, in this field being more modern doesn't necessarily mean being better or knowing more.
  - justin66 7y ago
    > Counterargument: skepticism is kind of boring compared to the other positions. There's just not much to build on if you flatly reject the ability to build things. Skepticism doesn't demand that you "reject the ability to do things." See Hume.
xelxebar 7y ago
> ... every statement of fact is just a statement of belief, it seems. Perhaps. The "just" part gets me thinking. There seems to be an important qualitative difference between prototypical statements of belief---e.g. I believe in the healing power of reiki---and prototypical statements of fact---e.g. This is a glass of water. While both of the above do contain elements of belief---namely, narratives about what things are in the world---they seem to operate quite differently in many respects. Belief-style statements tend to more overtly signal traits like social ingroup or self-identity. In particular, declaring belief in the power of reiki seems more likely to influence how others think and concieve of you as a person. I doubt that declaring the existence of a glass of water is likely to do the same. More generally, this line of thought makes tempts me to say that fact-like staments tend to have less social content than belief-style ones. Or, more susinctly, facts are a proper subset of beliefs. In the same way that 2D space differs wildly from 1000D space, despite the former being a subset of the latter, I think it ignores a lot to treat "facts" as "just beliefs." How a belief operates matters.
jaw 7y ago
I think that's a potentially misleading way of summarizing it. Facts are true beliefs; not all beliefs are true. The trilemma only implies that there's no way for me to step outside of my own head and know, beyond the possibility of error, that my beliefs are true. But they may still be true. (That applies recursively to the trilemma itself!) So if you dig far enough, how accurate our beliefs are is partly reliant on factors beyond our control: if our minds happen to be wired with bad axioms we may be unable to avoid inaccurate conclusions.
- wellpast 7y ago
  > But they may still be true. How? If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true. This statement has as much meaning as randomly uttered noise.
  - close04 7y ago
    Moral and purely subjective beliefs aside, unless we're talking about a wave function collapse, observing (proving?) a belief does not change the truth value of the underlying point of discussion. So implicitly... it is what it is whether you confirm it to be true or not. Broken clock telling the right time twice a day and all that. Take "the Earth is round" belief. The Earth was round since before humans existed. Having or not having evidence to support this belief did not and does not alter the shape in any way. The Earth is still round. So this belief was always true (even if unbeknownst to anyone) regardless of who held it and whether they had any evidence to support it.
  - gwd 7y ago
    > If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true. It may not be able to be verified, but it can often be falsified. Suppose I believe that all bridges are safe for me because there is a swarm of fairies following me around holding up the bridges. And suppose you believe that no bridges are safe between the hours of 2 and 3 am, because the gods have so decreed. And suppose we both come to a bridge at 2am. If I walk over the bridge and it collapses, it falsifies my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me, but it doesn't prove your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am. On the other hand, if I walk over the bridge and it doesn't collapse, it falsifies your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am, but does not prove my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me. "All models are wrong, but some models are useful."

So in short: if you are being truly logical, every statement of fact is just a statement of belief, it seems.

briefcomment 7y ago

Yes. Another way of looking at it is that there are no first principles.

KingMachiavelli 7y ago
And a similar concept to this is that given a set of accepted axioms, two parties should always come to the same conclusion if both parties are behaving rationally. All debates are at best disagreements of accepted premises and definitions. It's a important concept to remember for anyone who's argumentative/legalistic since understanding the oppossing sides definitions and desired conclusion is often the cause for disagreement. If there are no first principles, then there are no definitive last principles.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  An entertaining related concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem Also, in some ideal sense, since we attain consciousness as pure minds untainted by experience, tabula rasa, all that follows is the result of sense information on the network. The concept of individuality is weak. Two pure minds, fully rational and capable of honest communication, can be different by having different sense information, but if they are able to communicate with each other they should, in time, be identical. i.e. once I have given you everything I know completely and you have given me everything you know completely, we are not distinct, you and I are the same. A full mind meld. We can't do this for all sorts of reasons, but two AGIs truly meeting may, which means that there is a sort of greyness to this true meeting of AGIs: by meeting they achieve unity. All AGIs behaving in this manner then become the same purely by meeting. Interesting.
  - rocqua 7y ago
    This makes total sense, because of the assumption of common priors. Drop that assumption, and fully rational people can indeed agree to disagree. This is a large part of why rational people can look at the same evidence, and come to different conclusions.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      > This makes total sense, because of the assumption of common priors. That's the Wiki article, yes. But scarejunba is going past that, to something more fundamental. If you have "pure minds untainted by experience, tabula rasa", then you remove the issue of priors. No longer is there any matrix of prejudices that have to agree. You start with observations about the world and logic, and nothing else, and everyone ends up in agreement. (To an extent you might bootstrap with priors, but over time you'd use observations and logic to replace them, especially when they disagree with someone else you're debating.)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - smallnamespace 7y ago
        This seems unworkable because it ignores the role instincts have in living things, which are prior beliefs about the world put immediately into action. For example, an infant has an instinct to breathe right after birth. Is that a belief or an action? It’s both—a strategy to survive in the world encoded in genes attached to an implicit belief. An infant that tries to breathe two minutes later would suffer hypoxia and brain damage, while one that tries sooner will choke. There is no pure tabula rasa untainted by priors, as soon as you acknowledge minds are embedded in bodies shaped by millions of years of evolution and steeped in survival tactics, and what are tactics except a set of useful priors about good actions?
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        Things your body does don't have to be integrated into the priors you use when performing logic. But "You need to breathe." and things like that would be the easiest priors to replace with observational data.
psychoslave 7y ago
> Another way of looking at it is that there are no first principles. Is that part of the principles you adhere to? :)

dntbnmpls 7y ago

Yep. It's like the God problem. If God created the universe, then who created God? If another God created God, then who created that God. Ad infinitum. Or you can just ignore the exhausting issue altogether by claiming it is axiomatic. It's the same with any logical statement. You could go all the way up to the premises and question that and when given a proof of the premises, then you can question the premises of the "proof of the premises". Ad infinitum. Or you just take the axiomatic approach. I think most of life is lived axiomatically.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
This is correct, but a lot of people derive and indefensible conclusion from it. The real insight is that any belief in an axiom is an exercise in faith. A scientist who fails to recognise the role of faith in their beliefs commits the same error as a religious person who fails to recognise the role of faith in their beliefs.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  This is a common argument, and it is a form of argument by dictionary definition, which are seldom informative, and most often used to avoid the issues. While individual scientists may hold beliefs that go beyond scientific premises, the significant difference between scientific and religious belief is that in the former case, all axioms are considered to be defeasible - and they quite often are overthrown.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    The foundational axioms of scientific practice are generally not considered to be defeasible at all. The axioms of any particular theory or field may also be considered entirely beyond reproach. This is also not a semantic argument at all. It is strictly a logical one.
- specialist 7y ago
  Please humor me. Trying to articulate a half-baked notion. A close relative went from marine biologist to creationist (et al), and I've been struggling to accept the change. My Calvinist self still doesn't understand Evangelic system of faith. -- Given Structure + Process => Outcomes: Scientist: Faith in processes, eg scientific method. Belief is based on reproducibility. Evangelical: Faith in outcomes. The book (authority) is used to rationalize (justify) proclamations of belief. To your point: Yes, both have "faith", but with different starting points and emphasis.

SarikayaKomzin 7y ago

Indeed. This is why it often seems like anything built up rationally can be tore down rationally. This leads some to the interesting (and perhaps terrifying) conclusion that narratives are more important and useful than rationalism. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre “ According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos.[23][24] As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question.” Perhaps whatever is useful is oftentimes more important than what is true.

eb3c90 7y ago
>“ According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos.[23][24] As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question.” > >Perhaps whatever is useful is oftentimes more important than what is true. There has been an ongoing debate in the UK about proportional representation and the first past the post system. It has not, as yet, lead to violence and chaos. So I think that the link Maistre identifies between questioning the status quo and chaos is not always true. Admittedly there is time and place for debate. You don't argue about the cars direction, when the driver is trying to concentrate in a dangerous situation.
- SarikayaKomzin 7y ago
  Yeah. I shared that quote as an example of the “terrifying” conclusions this good lead one to, not necessarily because I though his reactionary stance was true (or useful, haha). But maybe the success of representative democracy is not based in rationalism but instead the mythology around individual liberty.
  - 7y ago

cwojno 7y ago

100% this. Most people do NOT realize this when engaged in normal conversation nor while in philosophical debates.

skrebbel 7y ago
That's just like, your opinion, man.

abtinf 7y ago

Humans require food and water to live. You might evade that fact as a mere belief, but you cannot escape the consequences of such an approach.

normalnorm 7y ago
What are the consequences? Have you ever experienced them yourself?

guerrilla 7y ago

No, this is not the conclusion that analytic epistemology has come to. Have a look at coherentism, foundationalism and reliabalism for example. The view you describe is skepticism and is held by a very small minority of modern philosophers. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/

scarmig 7y ago
Counterargument: skepticism is kind of boring compared to the other positions. There's just not much to build on if you flatly reject the ability to build things. People who're inclined to take that route are likely to avoid modern philosophy, so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers.
- guerrilla 7y ago
  Or you could take a look at the references and the corpus and see that there are strong arguments against it instead of just guessing with no data. Analytic philosophers don't tend to build things anyway. They focus more on answering specific questions. There are plenty of "continental" philosophers who still do and many in fact have no problem with this.
- paganel 7y ago
  You're assuming "building things" will bring us closer to getting to know the world a little better (or its essence), that might be false. > so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers I'm not a philosopher myself but I found Heraclitus's writings (Democritus's, too) a lot more interesting than many philosophers' writings from the 20th century, in this field being more modern doesn't necessarily mean being better or knowing more.
- justin66 7y ago
  > Counterargument: skepticism is kind of boring compared to the other positions. There's just not much to build on if you flatly reject the ability to build things. Skepticism doesn't demand that you "reject the ability to do things." See Hume.

xelxebar 7y ago

> ... every statement of fact is just a statement of belief, it seems. Perhaps. The "just" part gets me thinking. There seems to be an important qualitative difference between prototypical statements of belief---e.g. I believe in the healing power of reiki---and prototypical statements of fact---e.g. This is a glass of water. While both of the above do contain elements of belief---namely, narratives about what things are in the world---they seem to operate quite differently in many respects. Belief-style statements tend to more overtly signal traits like social ingroup or self-identity. In particular, declaring belief in the power of reiki seems more likely to influence how others think and concieve of you as a person. I doubt that declaring the existence of a glass of water is likely to do the same. More generally, this line of thought makes tempts me to say that fact-like staments tend to have less social content than belief-style ones. Or, more susinctly, facts are a proper subset of beliefs. In the same way that 2D space differs wildly from 1000D space, despite the former being a subset of the latter, I think it ignores a lot to treat "facts" as "just beliefs." How a belief operates matters.

jaw 7y ago

I think that's a potentially misleading way of summarizing it. Facts are true beliefs; not all beliefs are true. The trilemma only implies that there's no way for me to step outside of my own head and know, beyond the possibility of error, that my beliefs are true. But they may still be true. (That applies recursively to the trilemma itself!) So if you dig far enough, how accurate our beliefs are is partly reliant on factors beyond our control: if our minds happen to be wired with bad axioms we may be unable to avoid inaccurate conclusions.

wellpast 7y ago
> But they may still be true. How? If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true. This statement has as much meaning as randomly uttered noise.
- close04 7y ago
  Moral and purely subjective beliefs aside, unless we're talking about a wave function collapse, observing (proving?) a belief does not change the truth value of the underlying point of discussion. So implicitly... it is what it is whether you confirm it to be true or not. Broken clock telling the right time twice a day and all that. Take "the Earth is round" belief. The Earth was round since before humans existed. Having or not having evidence to support this belief did not and does not alter the shape in any way. The Earth is still round. So this belief was always true (even if unbeknownst to anyone) regardless of who held it and whether they had any evidence to support it.
- gwd 7y ago
  > If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true. It may not be able to be verified, but it can often be falsified. Suppose I believe that all bridges are safe for me because there is a swarm of fairies following me around holding up the bridges. And suppose you believe that no bridges are safe between the hours of 2 and 3 am, because the gods have so decreed. And suppose we both come to a bridge at 2am. If I walk over the bridge and it collapses, it falsifies my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me, but it doesn't prove your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am. On the other hand, if I walk over the bridge and it doesn't collapse, it falsifies your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am, but does not prove my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me. "All models are wrong, but some models are useful."