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mendel comments on Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) - Less Wrong
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Rooney, as discussed in The Simple Truth I follow a correspondence theory of truth. I am also a Bayesian and a believer in Occam's Razor. If a belief has no empirical consequences then it could receive no Bayesian confirmation and could not rise to my subjective attention. In principle there are many true beliefs for which I have no evidence, but in practice I can never know what these true beliefs are, or even focus on them enough to think them explicitly, because they are so vastly outnumbered by false beliefs for which I can find no evidence.
An explicit belief that you would not allow yourself to hold under these conditions would be that the tree which falls in the forest makes a sound - because no one heard it, and because we can't sense it afterwards, whether it made sound or not had no empirical consequence.
Every time I have seen this philosophical question posed on lesswrong, the two sophists that were arguing about it were in agreement that a sound would be produced (under the physical definition of the word), so I'd be really surprised if you could let go of that belief.
Hm, yeah. The trouble is how the doctrine handles deductive logic - for example, the belief that a falling tree makes vibrations in the air when the laws of physics say so is really a direct consequence of part of physics. The correct answer definitely appears to be that you can apply logic, and so the doctrine should be not to believe in something when there is no Bayesian evidence that differentiates it from some alternative.