"Just as a decision may obey or disobey desire," I once said, "so a discovery may confirm or disconfirm a belief." That's not exactly right, and I'd like to take a moment to correct it. Decisions are indeed to discoveries as desires are to beliefs. But obedience is to understanding, not confirmation, as desire is to belief. What does this difference imply about decision and discovery?
Well, a discovery can't really understand a belief and, likewise, a decision can't actually obey a desire. An action, or more accurately an actor, can obey and disobey somethign.
But there may be tensions between decision and desire, just as there may be tensions between discovery and belief. Perhaps we can say that if a discovery can, indeed, confirm a belief (I believe that there is a woman outside my door and, opening it, I discover that this is indeed the case, i.e., I confirm it) then a decision can ratify a desire (I desire to share the woman's company and, inviting her in, I decide to let this happen, i.e., I ratify it).
I can express the content of a belief as a statement, and the content of a desire as a command. These expressions may then be understood or misunderstood, obeyed or disobeyed. I cannot decide an action any more than I can discover a perception. Do or do not. See or don't see. There is no try.
Friday, September 03, 2010
Obedience (again)
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4 comments:
Lovely post...
"A discovery can't really understand a belief and, likewise, a decision can't actually obey a desire. An action, or more accurately an actor, can obey and disobey something" is a nice contribution to the theory of (grammatical) types.
And
"I can express the content of a belief as an assertion [corrected], and the content of a desire as a command." is a fine example of a grammatical pointer.
Thanks. And I always love to correct your corrections, so...
A statement is to a command as an assertion is to an instruction.
Statements and commands are, if you will, "hotter" than cool assertions and instructions.
I haven't looked into it specifically, but my intuition is that this also provides better symmetry at the etymological level, which I try to achieve as often as possible.
I was going for another kind of symmetry; namely for symmetry with the vocabulary of "speech acts"... And while "assertions" and "commands" are types of speech acts, a statement is not.
Within this sort of vocabulary, a 'statement' merely means 'something stated'. I.e. statements and utterances denote higher-level sets, whose members can be further categorized into say "assertions" and "commands"...
But I get what you are saying... In using my idiom which connects belief and assertion, there is also the risk of constricting the concept of belief more than we would like to.
An etymological relationship, however, that I always interesting (apropos of the "fact/act-dualism" that informs pangrammaticism) is that the words for "fact" in many languages are etymologically derived from words denoting actions.
In English we have "fact" derived "facere"(lat.), 'to do'.
In Danish we "kendsgerning", which used to mean an action made public in a court of law. (En kendt gerning).
And in German we have the 'tat', the deed, sitting right there in the beginning of 'tatsache'.
One of the reasons that I am pragmatist at heart, I guess....
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