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Lumifer comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong
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Generally speaking, understanding what a person means implies reconstructing their framework of meaning and reference that exists in their mind as the context to what they said.
Reconstructing such a framework does NOT require that you consider it (or the whole person) sane or rational.
Well, there are two questions here: 1) is it in principle necessary to assume your interlocutors are sane and rational, and 2) is it as a matter of practical necessity a fact that we always do assume our interlocutors are sane and rational. I'm not sure about the first one, but I am pretty sure about the second: the possibility space for reconstructing the meaning of someone speaking to you is only manageable if you assume that they're broadly sane, rational, and have mostly true beliefs. I'd be interested to know which of these you're arguing about.
Also, we should probably taboo 'sane' and 'rational'. People around here have a tendency to use these words in an exaggerated way to mean that someone has a kind of specific training in probability theory, statistics, biases, etc. Obviously people who have none of these things, like people living thousands of years ago, were sane and rational in the conventional sense of these terms, and they had mostly true beliefs even by any standard we would apply today.
The answers to your questions are no and no.
I don't think so. Two counter-examples:
I can discuss fine points of theology with someone without believing in God. For example, I can understand the meaning of the phrase "Jesus' self-sacrifice washes away the original sin" without accepting that Christianity is "mostly true" or "rational".
Consider a psychotherapist talking to a patient, let's say a delusional one. Understanding the delusion does not require the psychotherapist to believe that the patient is sane.
Mixing truth and rationality is a failure mode. To know whether someone statement is true , you have to understand it,ad to understand it, you have to assume the speaker's rationality.
It's also a failure mode to attach "Irrational" directly to beliefs. A belief is rational if it can be supported by an argument, and you don't carry the space of all possible arguments round jn your head,
That's an... interesting definition of "rational".
Puts on Principle of Charity hat...
Maybe TheAncientGreek means:
(1) a belief is rational if it can be supported by a sound argument
(2) a belief is rational if it can be supported by a valid argument with probable premises
(3) a belief is rational if it can be supported by an inductively strong argument with plausible premises
(4) a belief is rational if it can be supported by an argument that is better than any counterarguments the agent knows of
etc...
Although personally, I think it is more helpful to think of rationality as having to do with how beliefs cohere with other beliefs and about how beliefs change when new information comes in than about any particular belief taken in isolation.
There isn't a finite list of rational beliefs, because someone could think of an argument for a belief that you haven't thought of.
There isn't a finite list of correct arguments either. People can invent new ones.
I can't but note that the world "reality" is conspicuously absent here...
That there is empirical evidence for something is good argument for it.
Arguments of type (1) necessarily track reality (it is pretty much defined this way), (2) may or may not depending on the quality of the premises, (3) often does, and sometimes you just can't do any better than (4) with available information and corrupted hardware.
Just because I didn't use the word "reality" doesn't really mean much.
A definition of "rational argument" that explicitly referred to "reality" would be a lot less useful, since checking which arguments are rational is one of the steps in figuring what' real.
I am not sure this is (necessarily) the case, can you unroll?
Generally speaking, arguments live in the map and, in particular, in high-level maps which involve abstract concepts and reasoning. If I check the reality of the stone by kicking it and seeing if my toe hurts, no arguments are involved. And from the other side, classical logic is very much part of "rational arguments" and yet needs not correspond to reality.
That tends to work less well for things that one can't directly observe, e.g., how old is the universe, or things where there is confounding noise, e.g., does this drug help.
Well, it's not too compatible with self congratulations "rationality".
You're not being imaginative enough: you're thinking about someone with almost all true beliefs (including true beliefs about what Christians tend to say), and a couple of sort of stand out false beliefs about how the universe works as a whole. I want you to imagine talking to someone with mostly false beliefs about the subject at hand. So you can't assume that by 'Jesus' self-sacrifice washes away the original sin' that they're talking about anything you know anything about because you can't assume they are connecting with any theology you've ever heard of. Or even that they're talking about theology. Or even objects or events in any sense you're familiar with.
I think, again, delusional people are remarkable for having some unaccountably false beliefs, not for having mostly false beliefs. People with mostly false beliefs, I think, wouldn't be recognizable even as being conscious or aware of their surroundings (because they're not!).
So why are we talking about them, then?
Well, my point is that as a matter of course, you assume everyone you talk to has mostly true beliefs, and for the most part thinks rationally. We're talking about 'people' with mostly or all false beliefs just to show that we don't have any experience with such creatures.
Bigger picture: the principle of charity, that is the assumption that whoever you are talking to is mostly right and mostly rational, isn't something you ought to hold, it's something you have no choice but to hold. The principle of charity is a precondition on understanding anyone at all, even recognizing that they have a mind.
People will have mostly true beliefs, but they might not have true beliefs in the areas under concern. For obvious reasons, people's irrationality is likely to be disproportionately present in the beliefs with which they disagree with others. So the fact that you need to be charitable in assuming people have mostly true beliefs may not be practically useful--I'm sure a creationist rationally thinks water is wet, but if I'm arguing with him, that subject probably won't come up as much as creationism.
That's true, but I feel like a classic LW point can be made here: suppose it turns out some people can do magic. That might seem like a big change, but in fact magic will then just be subject to the same empirical investigation as everything else, and ultimately the same integration into physical theory the same as everything else.
So while I agree with you that when we specify a topic, we can have broader disagreement, that disagreement is built on and made possible by very general agreement about everything else. Beliefs are holistic, not atomic, and we can't partition them off while making any sense of them. We're never just talking about some specific subject matter, but rather emphasizing some subject matter on the background of all our other beliefs (most of which must be true).
The thought, in short, is that beliefs are of a nature to be true, in the way dogs naturally have four legs. Some don't, because something went wrong, but we can only understand the defect in these by having the basic nature of beliefs, namely truth, in the background.
That could be true but doesn't have to be true. Our ontological assumptions might also turn out to be mistaken.
To quote Eliezer:
True, and a discovery like that might require us to make some pretty fundamental changes. But I don't think Morpheus could be right about the universe's relation to math. No universe, I take it, 'runs' on math in anything but the loosest figurative sense. The universe we live in is subject to mathematical analysis, and what reason could we have for thinking any universe could fail to be so? I can't say for certain, of course, that every possible universe must run on math, but I feel safe in claiming that we've never imagined a universe, in fiction or through something like religion, which would fail to run on math.
More broadly speaking, anything that is going to be knowable at all is going to be rational and subject to rational understanding. Even if someone has some very false beliefs, their beliefs are false not just jibber-jabber (and if they are just jibber-jabber then you're not talking to a person). Even false beliefs are going to have a rational structure.