Justin Schwartz wrote:
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> Well, there's the usual paradox involved in falliblusm, I believe that each
> of my beliefs are true, and I believe that some of them aren't. But thsi is
> a problem for rationality, not truth.
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There's not much hard-wired into our brains, but it does seem impossible believing A is true while believing that believing A is true is a false belief. :-)
We don't just think that some of our beliefs are false -- we _know_ that a great many of them are. But we haven't a clue as to which are the true ones and which are the false ones. Fifty+ years ago I really believed that someone who hadn't read Cleanth Brooks (e.g., Aristotle, Pope, Wordsworth) couldn't really know what a poem was! That was pretty clearly a false belief -- but even 50+ years later I don't see how the Cbc of 1949 could have believed otherwise -- or have known that what he believed to be true was false. I think this is a fairly important tautology: While one believes something, one believes it, right up to the second when one changes one's mind. This in contrast to the Emerson-lover of the _Cantos_:
And Mr Lourpee sat on the floor of the pension dining-room
Or perhaps it was in the alcove
And about him lay a great mass of pastells, ` That is, stubbs and broken pencils of pastell,
In pale indeterminate colours.
And he admired the Sage of Concord
"Too broad ever to make up his mind."
And the mind of Lourpee at fifty
Directed him into a room with a certain vagueness
As if he wd.
go neither to the left nor the right
And his painting reflected this habit.
(Canto 28)
The interesting thing about Mr Lourpee, though, one might argue, is that he believed very strongly that he hadn't made up his mind. And he could not but go on believing that very strongly until the very moment when he changed his mind and made it up. :-)
Carrol