on belief

right so i'm in epistemology class and we're discussing doubters of the legitimacy of the epistemological enterprise. one strategy of debunking epis. is to deny one of the major tenets of the definition of knowledge most people would agree with (JTB). susan haack starts to characterize certain beliefs on belief that deny beliefs. these are accounts like the churchlands' and/or stephen stich's, accounts that pretty much argue: that which we believe, the processes we'd describe as beliefs are (replaceable with/reducible to) --> (connectionist artificial intelligence/computational cognitive science). on other words, what we think is belief is really ONLY some type of neurophysiological goings on in our brain and that's that. something fishy going on here...

detour into the philosophy of mind for a sec: okay so it seems that if we assume materialism (which i do), then all physical objects are made out of material stuff and nothing more. to me, this includes whatever we might call the "mind." the brain causes these mental states we subjectively experience, so in a way even our minds are material. however, much like supervenient qualities emerge in ant colonies and such, i think "consciousness", whatever that is, can only be explained as an emergent property (at least not yet) explainable in terms of its constituent parts.

so in the sense i just kinda described in a really rough way, belief is at least in part physical, because it necessarily involves our brains and ourselves. but is there anything else to it?

as an admitted pragmatist, i think it does. specifically, there has to be an action-related element. peirce argued convincingly that a belief was a habit of action. eg if you want to ice skate, and you believe there is an ice skating rink at such location, you go to the location to ice skate. this is a simple modus ponens, observable through a person's behavior. to help account for certain cases where one's behavior isn't so clearly observable, f.p. ramsey proposed to interpret someone's belief as a willingness to bet on the proposition in question. haack brings up the objection that some people might be already be rich (therefore less hesitant to bet or more willing to bet for the fun of it) or maybe be adrenaline junkies of such (so more willing to bet in risky ways). but i think these objections do reflect real epistemological attitudes in people, in the sense that some people are more willing to risk their knowledge's ass (in a way being more fallibalist than others). so these two objections i put to the side.

however, where i run into a big problem is what i think is when one tries to quantify degrees of belief. sometimes people can believe things more than other things... i believe i'm currently in my american studies class more than i believe, say, the legitimacy of quantum mechanics, although i do believe both. either way, even though i'd be able to act/bet more on my being in class than the physics theory, i don't know how much more. it would be a lot more, but i couldn't put a dollar value on it. but again, even though the cash value of my belief may be indeterminate, that doesn't mean that belief has nothing to do with action.

i hate to put myself in a situation where i agree with this guy, but richard rorty once wrote something about this that i tend to agree with. he said something along the lines of the following: if you believe something and you are not willing to act on it at all, then you don't really believe it. you're just fooling yourself linguistically. there has to be some element of self-risk when you do believe something (i guess lending itself to the ramsean analysis.)


so i guess that's what i believe about belief... sorry... couldn't help myself