I have this belief but have reasons to think you wont share it. e.g. “I believe she is attractive”.
In that case, you would mean that you find her attractive. That is not a belief. I would then conclude that you believe that you find her attractive, and, unless there is something very wrong with you, I would conclude that you find her attractive.
If you believe that her attractiveness is a property of her, rather than a property of you, then you have a different problem.
I agree with you and your reasoning on what you should believe following that. Yet still, I find myself saying to people, “I believe that …” to emphasise that it is my belief. Maybe I am wrong in doing this but it appears to help people understand that “she is attractive” is not a property of her. I guess I could just make it explicit another way by saying “I find her attractive”.
I will concede that it is not the most sensible use of the phrase “I believe” but people will still use it and it will remain helpful to have it as one of the buckets we can separate uses of that phrase into.
Generally people on Less Wrong use “belief” to refer to objective beliefs rather than opinions, as it seems to be a better way to carve reality reality along its joints. There’s no reason to assume that other people will adhere to this convention though.
So for a particular statement X, a rationalist will put it into one of two categories:
A mixture of 1 and 3 for different people: some people expressing belief in X have a low confidence, others believe they believe X
2: people expressing belief in X are expressing an opinion
The first is for facty statements, the second for subjective ones.
“opinion” is itself a fuzzily defined word. In this case it think you mean “opinions” in the sense of subjective tastes/preferences/likings—not in the sense of different beliefs about the truth-value of factual statements.
If you believe that her attractiveness is a property of her, rather than a property of you, then you have a different problem.
Or you could think of it as both. You could say ‘she is attractive_me’ or define attractive(attracted person, attracting person) as being true/false, and then say that attractive(me, her) == true. Agreed, you can’t have ‘she is attractive’, with ‘attractive’ denoting possession of a particular set of traits that remains constant regardless of whoever’s using the word.
But, yeah, I’m pretty sure that I agree with what you’re saying in general.
In that case, you would mean that you find her attractive. That is not a belief. I would then conclude that you believe that you find her attractive, and, unless there is something very wrong with you, I would conclude that you find her attractive.
If you believe that her attractiveness is a property of her, rather than a property of you, then you have a different problem.
I agree with you and your reasoning on what you should believe following that. Yet still, I find myself saying to people, “I believe that …” to emphasise that it is my belief. Maybe I am wrong in doing this but it appears to help people understand that “she is attractive” is not a property of her. I guess I could just make it explicit another way by saying “I find her attractive”.
I will concede that it is not the most sensible use of the phrase “I believe” but people will still use it and it will remain helpful to have it as one of the buckets we can separate uses of that phrase into.
Generally people on Less Wrong use “belief” to refer to objective beliefs rather than opinions, as it seems to be a better way to carve reality reality along its joints. There’s no reason to assume that other people will adhere to this convention though.
So for a particular statement X, a rationalist will put it into one of two categories:
A mixture of 1 and 3 for different people: some people expressing belief in X have a low confidence, others believe they believe X
2: people expressing belief in X are expressing an opinion
The first is for facty statements, the second for subjective ones.
“opinion” is itself a fuzzily defined word. In this case it think you mean “opinions” in the sense of subjective tastes/preferences/likings—not in the sense of different beliefs about the truth-value of factual statements.
Yep—thanks for clarifying.
Or you could think of it as both. You could say ‘she is attractive_me’ or define attractive(attracted person, attracting person) as being true/false, and then say that attractive(me, her) == true. Agreed, you can’t have ‘she is attractive’, with ‘attractive’ denoting possession of a particular set of traits that remains constant regardless of whoever’s using the word.
But, yeah, I’m pretty sure that I agree with what you’re saying in general.
ETA: “whoever’s”