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Keith_Coffman comments on Reverse engineering of belief structures - Less Wrong
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Comments (34)
I don't really understand what your problem is; to evaluate a claim, you have to find it intelligible, for which you have to know contingent things about the empirical practice of the relevant language-game - which, yes, is pretty much equivalent to the ordinary language statement 'if you understand the claim, you can test it'.
I agree. I'm glad we finally got there. I have been saying your equivalent of "you have to find it intelligible" this whole time. You have to understand the claim to test it.
But you don't have to understand how they came to that conclusion. In case it's not clear, that's how I've been using the term "belief structure."
By the way, it would greatly help the discussion along if you answered all non-rhetorical questions, because that would help me understand where things aren't clicking.
*Edit: Upon rereading our discussion, it looks like you think the qualifier "you have to understand what the claim is claiming" contradicts the statement "you don't need to know how they came to the conclusion." The reason I keep repeating each is that they do not contradict; I want you to consider each statement carefully: "How they came to the conclusion" addresses the logic by which they arrived at a particular belief - such as A & B therefore C. "You don't need to know how they came to the conclusion " addresses whether C is correct. A & B are not involved in the evaluation; the only time context enters into it is understanding what C means.
I said 'how they claim to that conclusion' was extremely ambiguous (it can certainly mean more than the logic relations by which they deduced something in abstraction), and gave a particular sense. I have been saying the whole time, in my own words, which I translated 'how they came to that conclusion' into after admitting ambiguity, that finding an utterance intelligible is a condition of evaluating its truth-value, for which a posteriori knowledge of language conventions and the speaker in question, is necessary (which, depending on the complexity and/or normality of the utterance, might or might not require some knowledge of the logical relations which they drew, or the epistemic practices which they exercised - but this narrow issue isn't what I have been talking about). If you cast 'how I came to that conclusion' wide enough, such as the entire belief structure of the speaker in question, then some knowledge of that doubtlessly is requisite to understanding their utterances (i.e. like what the language community in which they're embedded means when they utter a certain combination of noises).
It would help if you stopped changing your claim, which is only confusing the matter, i.e. from not needing to 'know how someone formed their belief', to 'the belief structure of the person', to 'how I came to that conclusion'.
Each reiteration of "how someone formed their belief" is an attempt on my part to clarify the meaning, since you yourself just said that it is "extremely ambiguous." The concept I am attempting to convey remains the same, however.
I will bring in a quote by Shakespeare: "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Language is the means by which we communicate information interpersonally. Language is important, as it is imperative that the sender and the receiver internalize the same concept. However, the rose and how it smells is independent of the language; when I say "evaluate a claim" I mean you go and smell the rose yourself, with the underlying qualifier being that you know they are talking about a rose in the first place.
Non-rhetorical questions: Can you smell a rose if you speak modern French? What if you speak 16th Century German? Does it smell difference based on the language you speak?
Furthermore, your ability to smell the rose doesn't depend on whether I claimed something about it based on empirical evidence (such as smelling it myself) or if I just heard it from someone else and believed it. These are very simple ways of coming to a conclusion, but it illustrates what I mean when I say it can be verified independent from the belief structure behind it.
Firstly, I never said that 'how someone formed their belief' was ambiguous, I said that 'how someone arrived at a conclusion' was; you replaced the former with the latter. You have already admit the qualification I urged several times. I am aghast as to why you persist in reverting to what you have already denied.
Secondly, evaluating a claim is not travelling to the object-of-understanding and accruing the percepts to independently verify its truth-value, something which - as you admit, and as is the whole force of my half of the discussion - is itself impossible without knowing "they are talking bout the rose in the first place". That is to say, a condition of evaluation is finding intelligible the utterance given, for which speaker context and knowledge of the relevant language-game is relevant (the particular conventions of using language in particular subcultures for particular forms of activity).
The action of being physically proximate to a rose and allowing its scent wave over your smell receptors and trigger certain neural connections, is obviously possible for most humans. This does not undermine in the slightest, however, that utterances about roses and their perfume are only intelligible relative to linguistic community the speaker is party to. If I contrived a private language according to whose conventions 'barkbark22' was related to smelling roses, you would obviously have no idea - and couldn't - what I was doing in making that utterance, and would not be able to, independently of understanding the utterance, judge its truth-value.
Note that we are talking about evaluating a CLAIM - a linguistic utterance. NOT the independent reality which that claim might refer or relate to.
I also disagree with your archaic conception of empirical verification independent of belief structure, but that is another argument which I certainly don't want to enter.
I think I see where things aren't matching, and aside from your last comment I think it's a matter of definitions rather then concepts.
Firstly, when I say "evaluate a claim" I mean checking that it matches with objective reality - NOT understanding what the claim means in it's linguistic context. If I managed to translate "barkbark22" into something I understood, I could then evaluate it. If you want to say that my definition of the phrase "evaluate a claim" is faulty, fine, but you should now understand what I mean by it.
Secondly, I think that the statements "how someone arrived at a conclusion" and "how someone formed their belief" are equivalent, and at the very least I have been using them as such. Likewise, if you think this is wrong, you at least know what I'm saying now hopefully.
As for verification of a claim's truth being empirical, I don't see how someone's belief structure could affect objective reality, unless the claim specifically relates to someone's state of mind (such as "I am angry").
You can't check a claim independently of understanding it, for which contextual knowledge is necessary. It's as simple as that.
I am also confused as to why your think all claims are empirically verifiable, i.e. if X is Y and Z is X then Y is Z. Most language is not world-referent.
I know you can't check a claim without understanding it. I've said as much (the qualifier you keep mentioning). My point is that, given you do understand it, you can check it.
I don't think that all claims are empirically verifiable - that was my mistake in writing. However you still haven't explained how someone's belief structure could affect objective reality (outside of their own state of mind).
I'm sorry, but this is getting absurd.
You said:
I responded:
You responded to my response:
You are flatly contradicting yourself. You keep doing this: stating the unqualified version, then upon my response, admitting the qualification, and the all of a sudden reverting back to the unqualified version.
My point was that you can't, besides bare particles of sense experience, interpret the external world independent of a belief structure, but as stated - given the length and circularity of this debate - I don't want to turn this into a second discussion.
You are misrepresenting the statement-response structure.
I simultaneously say two things:
1) You must understand a claim to check it, else you wouldn't know what to check. (we both agree here, I think)
2) Given that you can understand a claim, it can be checked
You say "Hold on, you can't understand a claim without the context!" And I agree. In the practical reality that we must face on a daily basis, you can't really ever avoid the fact that we must communicate via language and we also often imply some additional details, such as time/location.
Let's say I claim "Il pleut." (in French it means "it's raining").
There are several things in the context that matter: a) You need to either speak my language or have it translated into your own. b) In context, the claim is really that "It's raining in this area at this time" (this is important, as it might not be raining elsewhere or in the past/future here).
Even if you didn't know what I said, it is in fact either raining at this place and this time or it is not. You need not understand my claim in order to see if it's raining. However, you also wouldn't check in the first place because you didn't know it was claimed.
What I've been trying to do this whole time, which you seem not to have grasped yet, is that I am separating the truth of the claim (a statement about reality) and the baggage that we must actually deal with when we communicate such a claim to each other (hence my distinction between understanding a claim and checking a claim).
Do you follow me?