It’s not necessarily an advantageous habit. If a person tells you they like ice cream, and you’ve seen them eating ice cream regularly with every sign of enjoyment, you have as much evidence that they like ice cream as you have about countless other things that nobody bothers hanging qualifiers on even in Japanese. The sciences are full of things we can’t experience directly but can still establish with high confidence.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people’s mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people’s mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Increased awareness of degrees of certainty is more or less what I was thinking of encouraging. It hadn’t occurred to me to look for a deeper motive and try to address it directly. This was helpful, thank you.
It’s not necessarily an advantageous habit. If a person tells you they like ice cream, and you’ve seen them eating ice cream regularly with every sign of enjoyment, you have as much evidence that they like ice cream as you have about countless other things that nobody bothers hanging qualifiers on even in Japanese. The sciences are full of things we can’t experience directly but can still establish with high confidence.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people’s mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Increased awareness of degrees of certainty is more or less what I was thinking of encouraging. It hadn’t occurred to me to look for a deeper motive and try to address it directly. This was helpful, thank you.