X-Beliefs

Things we have to believe in order to learn anything about the world from experience, but which cannot be learned from experience.
Quite a puzzle for the empiricist! But don't worry; there are solutions available!

[@Tuunyiii]

Your videos make me curious about philosophy! Thank you for your uploads! :)

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

Some that are born blind have no concept of shape, size, or distance (this would seem to indicate that "the mind" does not concoct these concepts in a vacuum, but instead creates them in concert with your external sensors).

[@TeacherOfPhilosophy]

You are not far from Kant. Keep moving in that direction. It will do you good.

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

Mathematics is VALIDATED "outside the mind", otherwise there would be no reason to study it.

[@TeacherOfPhilosophy]

So now you're a mathematical realist?

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

@@TeacherOfPhilosophy Godel makes a pretty clear point about how no system (including mathematics) can validate itself.

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

@@TeacherOfPhilosophy I do not subscribe to "mathematical platonism".

[@TeacherOfPhilosophy]

And yet you think mathematical--and, I presume, geometrical--facts are mind-independent?
Do you realize that most of what you've been saying on my channel in the last 24 hours is Hume's Fork--his infamous division of all knowledge into "relations of ideas" that don't describe the world outside the mind at all and "matters of fact" which can _only_ be known from sensory experience? Did you know that he classifies truths of mathematics and geometry as relations of ideas?

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

@@TeacherOfPhilosophy You seem to have completely overlooked the "and or logically-necessary" stipulation in my initial definition of FACT.

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

How the heck do you propose someone calibrate their "instinctive" "xbeliefs" for "proper" "function" (to insure they are "warranted")?? Thomas Reid is just pretending the "problem" doesn't exist by clumsily re-labeling AXIOMS as "xbeliefs". THEY'RE JUST AXIOMS.

[@TeacherOfPhilosophy]

That question makes very little sense to ask of Reid's theory; I don't know how to calibrate a belief.
Please note that "X-Beliefs" is my terminology, not Reid's.
Most people use the terminology "Problem of Induction," which annoys me because you can easily enough solve _that_ problem by positing the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature. That just leaves you with the Problem of the Uniformity of Nature. But you could solve _that_ problem by positing the Principle of Induction and going back to another problem.
I think it's much better to recognize that the so-called "Problem" is that there must remain at least one proposition which is used to learn about the world from experience which is not itself learned from experience. That was the insight of Hume. Until I come across some better terminology, I'm using "X-Beliefs."
It is only a problem for people who insist that all knowledge of the world outside the mind must come from experience and experience alone. It is not a problem for Augustine, Kant, Thomas Reid, Alvin Plantinga, or me.

[@TeacherOfPhilosophy]

If you're not following all of this, a good commentary on Hume might help. I can give you a blog URL if you like. There will be a detailed series on Hume on this channel sometime next year. In the meantime, maybe you could go to the Articles in Contemporary Philosophy playlist and find the video on Bertrand Russell's article "Logical Positivism."

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

@@TeacherOfPhilosophy When you say, "I don't know how to calibrate a belief." are you suggesting that beliefs are tantamount to AXIOMS?? - - I'm going to refer to them as X-AXIOMS. - - LOGIC is validated by empirical demonstration. An infant's mind may, through trial and error, attempt to organize its accumulated (pre-verbal) data in any number of ways in some subconscious effort to enhance its primarily instinctive behavior in order to increase its relative comfort and decrease its relative discomfort. Formal LOGIC may NOT be its *first attempt* to organize this data and convert it to actionable data, but eventually most infants arrive at a point where their mind can functionally be described as a logical mechanism for converting raw sensory data into actionable data.

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

@@TeacherOfPhilosophy Thanks, I'll take a look.

[@LOGICZOMBIE]

@@TeacherOfPhilosophy "there must remain at least one proposition which is used to learn about the world from experience which is not itself learned from experience." - - Can't the primordial impulse to "think" be instinctive? I'm not sure how proposing an "axiom of axioms" ("xbelief") magically "solves" this "problem".