In response to this and the other point, one of the things that has to be part of the story is an explanation of how something can be "close enough" to count as belief, while still being wrong in some way. And this explanation has to work in a way that distinguishes among the many systems that are "good enough", which ones are better. (I claim that the Bayesian picture will turn out to be the core that defines this set, but it could well turn out to be something else, though it will be some sort of relation to evidence.)
Presumably what this ends up with is a story where if you take everything on faith, then you don't count as believing - you're just a book or a computer memory, which will story whatever inputs it gets, regardless of whether they represent anything accurately. But if some amount of things are accepted on faith, that won't be enough to destroy the whole system. Presumably, the people who believe religious things on faith still have lots of beliefs about other things that are appropriately related to evidence, about things like whether there's a table in front of them, or what color the sky is.
Anyway, because of the margin of error, it won't be a tautology that any particular belief is responsive to any particular piece of evidence, though it will be a tautology that in general beliefs will be responsive to some sort of evidence. The way you get a notion of goodness out of this will be like much of our apparently non-normative use of the word. A good knife is something that cuts smoothly and easily, though many things that don't cut smoothly and easily will count as knives to some extent because they manage to cut in some way. Similarly, a good chair will support someone sitting on it very well and comfortably, while many things will count as chairs in virtue of doing it not so well.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: the is-ought gap
Date: 2010-10-14 10:13 pm (UTC)Presumably what this ends up with is a story where if you take everything on faith, then you don't count as believing - you're just a book or a computer memory, which will story whatever inputs it gets, regardless of whether they represent anything accurately. But if some amount of things are accepted on faith, that won't be enough to destroy the whole system. Presumably, the people who believe religious things on faith still have lots of beliefs about other things that are appropriately related to evidence, about things like whether there's a table in front of them, or what color the sky is.
Anyway, because of the margin of error, it won't be a tautology that any particular belief is responsive to any particular piece of evidence, though it will be a tautology that in general beliefs will be responsive to some sort of evidence. The way you get a notion of goodness out of this will be like much of our apparently non-normative use of the word. A good knife is something that cuts smoothly and easily, though many things that don't cut smoothly and easily will count as knives to some extent because they manage to cut in some way. Similarly, a good chair will support someone sitting on it very well and comfortably, while many things will count as chairs in virtue of doing it not so well.