I 365
Beliefs and quotes can be understood as all sorts of different things (vagueness).
I 372
Paul and Elmer: belief does not produce sentences like legends. The following cannot be decided: that Paul believes true and Elmer does not. If the truth value does not matter, believing is no relative term. W believes x is no predicate - w believes p: p is not a term. >
Truth Value/Quine.
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VII (h) 142
Belief/Quine: there is no relation. Belief is related to the false sentence. Instead Church argues that belief and knowledge just resemble quotes - (>Opaque contexts, >
Opacity).
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XII 34
Belief/Quine: E.g. Thomas believes that Tullius wrote the Ars Magna - in fact, he confuses Tullius with Lullus. There are two options: a) Tom does not believe that Cicero (Tullius) wrote the Ars Magna, he just confuses the names, i.e. he knows who wrote the Ars Magna - here Tullius does not purely appear in a referential way. b) He believes something wrong: then Tullius is purely indicative.
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Stroud I 228
Belief/Knowledge/Quine: knowledge is not part of belief - nothing we believe about the external world is knowledge. >
Knowledge/Quine.
Brandom I 790/791
Relational Belief/Quine: relational belief brings along a special epistemic access to or contact with objects and de re-attributions which include existence stipulations.
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Quine I 146
To the same extent that radical translation is underdetermined by the totality of dispositions to linguistic behavior, our theories and beleifs are underdetermined forever and ever.
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II 55
Stimulus/Quine: a stimulus does not make statements true, but leads to documented beliefs.
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IV 413
Quine Two Dogmas: Thesis: "The totality of our so-called knowledge and/or our beliefs - from the most incidental things of geography to the most fundamental laws even of mathematics and logic - is a material knitted by humans, which meets experience only at its edges. The totality of science is like a force field whose boundary conditions are experiences."
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VI 20
Change/Theory Change/Quine: If we change our beliefs, many sentences must be spared, also because they are simply irrelevant!
But if we reject beliefs, we have to track down all sentences that contain them. "Maxime of Minimal Mutilation".
VI 92
Belief/Quine: Example "x believes that p" is itself a permanent sentence, because a belief is a state.
VI 94
Belief/Quine: can always be common to a plurality of subjects. Moreover, perceptions are always perceived veritatively, beliefs are not perceived this way. ((s) One cannot perceive something wrong.)
VI 100
Perception/Belief/Quine: Every perception is in principle completely describable using strictly neurological terms. However, this does not apply to beliefs. >
Perception/Quine.
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XIII 18
Belief/Quine: believing is thinking in a certain limited sense. To believe something is to think it. "Think like this" and "believe like this" are interchangeable and also "think that" and "believe that".
But they differ elsewhere.
Thinking/Quine: for example we can think intensely, but we cannot believe intensely. For example we can believe something, but not think something. Grammar forbids this.
Belief/Thinking/Action/Disposition/Quine: Belief is a disposition - thinking is an activity. Thinking can make us tired, belief cannot.
XIII 19
We also do not sit there and believe something. Only the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland does that: before breakfast she believes 6 impossible things.
Wrong: e.g. a young man in love believes what his lover believes - Example William James' "Will to believe": Example Pascal's bet, Example Tertullian: credo quia absurdum: these are distortions of the concept of belief.
Belief/Disposition/Quine: what then is the believer disposed for? A good test is to ask someone to use money for what he/she is pleading for.
XIII 20
Problem: this is only possible with decidable questions, not with the question whether beauty is truth.
Beauty/Truth/Belief/Keats/Quine: one also wonders whether Keats really believed that. Maybe he just wanted to create a bit of beauty himself, like e.g. Morning Star: "just for the rhyme". >
Beauty/Quine.
Belief/Quine: belief comes mostly in bundles of dispositions. It is remarkable that this can lead to such different actions as, for example, booking a cruise, or tidying up the room.
Thesis: these extremely different mental states (mental state, internal state) have nothing in common.
XIII 21
The only thing in common is linguistically: the "that". ((s) >
propositional attitudes).
Problem: the constant form of "x believes that p" lets us assume that the rest of the sentence is also in order. But this changes from case to case, so that it is difficult to draw a line here.
Belief/Paradox/Quine: to believe something is to believe that it is true. So a person believes that all his/her beliefs are true. But experience shows that some beliefs are wrong, as this person knows very well.
Problem: So a rational person believes that every one of his/her beliefs are true and yet some are false. I would have expected something better from rational people.
