What is a belief? Per the dictionary, it is the acceptance that something exists or is true. So, for example, you might believe that it is raining. One reason that beliefs are important is because they guide our everyday actions. So if you want to go outside, you might first grab an umbrella or raincoat. Or you might decide to stay inside until the rain stopped. Everyone from their early years, by observing and learning to identify that pattern of behavior in others and in themselves, becomes competent at using the word "belief" in their everyday communication.
Beyond this everyday usage, there are many philosophical, scientific and folk theories about what a belief (and the mind more generally) consists of, ranging from an immaterial substance through to identification with physical brain states. However, as with the concept of pain discussed previously, the concept of belief is a publicly communicable abstraction. Like Wittgenstein's beetle, whatever it is that "belief" ultimately refers to drops out of consideration as irrelevant in normal conversation.
Suppose it were discovered that our beliefs were the result of a tiny gnome in our heads that records what we see and reminds us about it when it matters. Such a discovery, while surprising (unless you read Terry Pratchett), wouldn't change the everyday meaning and usage of the word "belief" at all. We would still want to grab our umbrella when it's raining.
So what does this mean for theories of the mind? For one thing, it means that theorizers have almost limitless scope for creative exploration while still being able to retain compatibility with our everyday language concepts. For another, it means that theories of mind (in principle at least) will always be publicly communicable since they will expand on rather than replace our existing conceptual framework.
One notable example of this in philosophy is with the perennial question of free will. In ordinary usage, the concept of choice is the ability to select between alternatives. The concept exists because we commonly observe people conforming to that pattern of behavior and we have needed a way to refer to it. But how that abstract concept is actualized, while of philosophical and scientific interest, has no bearing on the existence of that behavioral pattern and its central importance in our everyday activities.
It's interesting to consider this language abstraction concept in terms of AI. If a robot is taught the concept of belief, and uses the phrase 'I believe' does the robot really believe or is it merely using our language abstraction idioms.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. This is the strong AI hypothesis. If the robot's behavior exhibits our everyday concept of belief then its belief is real. But of course in order to achieve that, the robot would need to have learned many other concepts as well, just as a young child needs to learn many concepts before it becomes proficient at using language.
DeleteThe comment 'theories of mind are always publicly communicable' is a bit of a given, when considered within the framework of public communication abstraction. I can imagine people having ideas or feelings that are outside the realm of language, and these would not be publicly communicable since there is no language history around the idea.
ReplyDeleteRight. What is needed is to identify the observable phenomena associated with those ideas or feelings in order to be able to speak (and think) meaningfully about them.
DeleteBeauty, love, creativity: these are some of those ideas or feelings that (IMO) fall outside the realm of language. We can know them when we see them but we can't capture them in a definition. And yet, I am not so sure that there is a single "observable phenomena" that goes with them. Instead I suspect it may be at best a "family resemblance" of different behavioural elements where some subset of the group are present.
DeleteAnd even then, to see that a landscape is beautiful, we have simply invoked a very blunt object (the word 'beauty') as our means of conveying the abstraction, and that is only because we are unable to do better, except by recourse to metaphor and the ilk.