Saying “I believe X” does seem to have different connotations than simply stating X; I’d be more likely to say “I believe X” when X is controversial, for example.
Specifically they’re different because of the pragmatic conversation rule that direct statements should be something your conversation partner will accept, in most normal conversations. You say “X” when you expect your conversation partner to say something like “oh cool, I didn’t know that.” You say “I believe X” when they may disagree and your arguments will come later or not at all. “It’s true that X” is more complicated; one example of use would be after the proposition X has already come up in conversation as a belief and you want to state it as a fact.
A: “I hear that lots of people are saying the sky is blue.”
B: “The sky is blue.”
The above sounds weird. (Unless you are imagining it with emphasis on “is” which is another way to put emphasis on the truth of the proposition.) “The sky is blue” is being stated without signaling its relationship to the previous conversation so it sounds like new information; A will expect some new proposition and be briefly confused; it sounds like echolalia rather than an answer.
That’s a better explanation than I could come up with.
On a completely irrelevant note, why is “the sky is blue” the standard for “obviously true fact”? The sky is black about half the time, and it’s pretty common for it to be white, too.
If you count navy as blue rather than as black, that happens more rarely than “half the time”. (I’d say “10% of the time” as I have that number cached in my mind as the duty cycle of fluorescence detectors for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.) You know, the moon.
and it’s pretty common for it to be white, too.
And when that happens, in places where electric lighting is widely used, it tends to become orange (not quite—does that colour have a name?) during the night!
When the sky is white, it’s not the sky; it’s clouds blocking the sky. When the sky is black it’s just too dark to see the sky. At least that was my intuition before I knew that the sky wasn’t some conventionally blue object. I guess its a question of word usage whether the projective meaning of “blue” which is something like “looks blue under good lighting conditions” should still be applied when it’s not caused by reflectance. Though it’s not blue from all directions is it?
I’d say “sky” is a relative concept and depends on where you are. If I was on the mountainside and had clouds below me, I still wouldn’t say I’m in the sky. (But I would if I was on a plane, so it’s not as simple as “anything that’s above me”.)
And I’m on the ground right now. There doesn’t seem to be any clouds above me, but if there were, they’d be in the sky, and the sky would have white splotches.
I consider anything that is contiguously attached to the planet (or moon) which I am currently on (e.g. a man on a mountaintop), or less than about two metres from the ground (e.g. a man jumping up and down) to not be in the sky. Anything further than that from ground surface, and either currently ascending or able to maintain that altitude, counts as ‘in the sky’; anything further than that from ground surface and not able to maintain that altitude, counts as ‘falling from the sky’.
The building is contiguously attached to the ground (unless it’s some sort of flying building). You need to be more than two metres away from it and falling to count as ‘falling from the sky’.
For safety reasons, it’s probably also better to throw an object—I’d suggest a tennis ball—if you actually want to perform an experiment. You could get it to the state ‘falling from the sky’ by throwing it hard enough horizontally from a fourth- or fifth-floor window, or dropping it off a bridge.
Hmmm… I may need to update my definition to consider the ‘dropped-from-a-bridge’ case.
I’d say that it has to be far enough from the ground that you wouldn’t notice the parallax effect if you walked around below it, it has to be above the horizon. Also, it can’t be an airplane or something. I’m not sure why exactly that last rule is there, given that meteors and such count. Maybe most people would consider it part of the sky. I’d say it’s in the sky, but not part of it.
I guess its a question of word usage whether the projective meaning of “blue” which is something like “looks blue under good lighting conditions” should still be applied when it’s not caused by reflectance.
What would you call a glass absorbing red/orange/yellow light and letting the rest through?
As I understand it, the sky does let red-yellow light through. It scatters blue light and lets red light through relatively unchanged. So it looks red-yellow near the light source and blue everywhere else.
It’s something that everybody has quick access to. Another version would be “things fall”, which is better but also only works on a planet and with objects denser than air for example. It would be ideal to have some unchanging reference object that we can make statements about, instead we have something that everyone has seen and they can say “I have seen that, it was pretty much blue”
With close friends this works, saying “I believe X” signals uncertains where someone could help with avaliable information. But in public debates if you say “I believe X” instead of “X”, people will find more confidente and secure.
You’re right. I think the lesson we should take from all this complexity is to remember that the wording of a sentence is relevant to more than just it’s truth conditions. Language does a lot more than state facts and ask questions.
But this bring a tradeoff, how much do you sacrifice to show security and confidence? I suppose, there are people who tell the truth even in situations where this attitude will cause complications.
“God exists”—“I’ve had conversations with God; he’s a good fellow.”
“I believe that God exists”—“A lot of people say that God exists and I agree with them.”
“I believe that I believe that God exists”—“I do see some inconsistencies about God but I go to church and I pray. Plus all my friends are Christian, that means I’m a believer, right?”
“I believe that I believe that I believe that God exists”—“I think that what it means to believe in something is an aggregate of the actions you take and the anticipations you feel. So I can have doubt at the object level but still count as believing if I respond similarly to other believers...”
“I believe that I believe that I believe that I believe that God exists”—“Okay, I need to talk to fewer rationalists.”
Doesn’t seem to me like the first “believe” you append implies a different meta level, just a different reason for believing. After all, the one who asserts “God exists” also believes God exists.
Or, maybe the way you’ve set it out, “I believe that God exists” is belief in belief, in which case in the next one, the extra “I believe” just indicates uncertainty.
I think that the general trend that you observed, that you tend to get more meta as you add more “I believes”, may be making you miss when the words “I believe” add nothing, or just mean “probably”.
I agree with Xachariah’s view of semantics. I think that the first ‘I believe’ does imply a different meta level of belief (often associated with a different reason for believing). His example does a good job of showing how someone can drill down many levels, but the distinction in the first level might be made more clear by considering a more concretely defined belief:
“We’re lost”—“I’m you’re jungle leader, and I don’t have a clue where we are any more.”
“I believe we’re lost”—“I’m not leading this expedition. I didn’t expect to have a clue where we were going, but it doesn’t seem to me like anyone else knows where we are going either.”
--
“Sarah won state science fair her senior year of high school”—“I attended the fair and witnessed her win it.”
“I believe that Sarah won state science fair her senior year of high school”—“She says she did, and she’s the best experimentalist I’ve ever met.”
“I believe that I believe that Sarah won state science fair her senior year of high school”—“She says she did, and I don’t believe for one second that she’d make that sort of thing up. That said, she’s not, so far as I can tell, particularly good at science, and it shocks me that she might somehow have been able to win.”
--
“Parachuting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” -- “I’ve gone parachuting, and frankly, I’ve gotten bigger adrenaline rushes playing poker.”
“I don’t believe parachuting’s all it’s cracked up to be.” -- “I haven’t gone parachuting. There’s no way I would spend $600 for a 4 minute experience when I can’t imagine that it’s enough fun to justify that.”
Without the ‘I believe,’ what I tend to be saying is, I trust the map because I drew it and I drew it carefully. With the ‘I believe,’ I tend to be saying I trust this map because I trust it’s source even though I didn’t actually create it myself. In the case of the parachuting, I don’t know where the map comes from, it’s just the one I have.
Placing additional “I believe”s in front of a statement changes what part of the statement you have confidence in.
The statement ‘I believe God exists’ usually does mean that someone places confidence in eir community’s ability to determine if God exists or not rather than placing confidence in the statement itself. Most of the religious people I know would say ‘God exists’ rather than ‘I believe God exists’ and most of them believe that they have directly experienced God in some way. However, most of them would say ‘I believe the Bible is true’ rather than ‘the Bible is true’—and when pressed for why they believe that, they tend to say something along the lines of “I cannot believe that God would allow his people to be generally wrong about something that important” or something else that asserts that their confidence is in their community’s ability to determine that ‘the Bible is true’ rather than their confidence being in the Bible itself. I don’t know if this is a very localized phenomenon or not since all of the people I’ve had this conversation with belong to the same community. It’s how I would tend to use the word ‘believe’ too, but I grew up in this community, so I probably tend to use a lot of words the same way as the people in this community do.
In Xachariah’s example the certainty/uncertainty is being placed on the definition of ‘believe’ at each step past the first one, so the way that the the statement is changing is significantly different in the second and third application of ‘I believe’ than it is in the first. The science fair example applies the ‘I believe’ pretty much the same way twice.
When I say “Sarah won science fair,” I’m claiming that all of the uncertainty lies in my ability to measure and accurately record the event. Her older sister is really good at science too; it’s possible that I’m getting the two confused but I very strongly remember it being Sarah who won. On the other hand, I’m extremely confident that I wouldn’t give myself the wrong map intentionally—I have no reason to want to convince myself that Sarah is better at science than she actually is.
That source of uncertainty essentially vanishes when the source of my information becomes Sarah herself. I now have a new source of uncertainty though because she does have a reason to convince me that she is better at science than she actually is. However, I trust the map because it agrees with what I’d expect it to be. I’d still think she was telling the truth about this if she lied to me about other things.
In the third case, I’m once again extremely confident that Sarah won science fair. She told me she did, and she tells the truth. What she’s told me does not at all agree with my expectations; I don’t really place confidence in the map, I place confidence a great deal of confidence in Sarah’s ability to create an accurate map, and I place a great deal of confidence in her having given me an accurate map. The map seems preposterous to me, but I still think it’s accurate, so when someone asks me if I believe that Sarah won science fair, I wince and I say “I believe that I believe that Sarah won science fair” and everyone knows what I mean. My statement isn’t really “Sarah won science fair.” It’s “Sarah doesn’t lie. Sarah says she won science fair. Therefore, Sarah won science fair.” If I later find out that Sarah isn’t quite as honest as I think she is, this is the first thing she’s told me that I’ll stop believing. Unless that happens, I’ll continue to believe that she won.
Precisely: for some reason you’re not allowed to say “I assign a 70% probability to X being true” without people looking at you funny, and even “I think X is more likely than not-X, but you shouldn’t be as confident of this as you are of most things I tell you” is kind of awkward, but “I believe so” is a pretty standard idiom for expressing high-probability-which-is-still-non-negligibly-different-from-1.
If you’re stuck trying to communicate in an innumerate language then you use whatever phrasing you have available.
If you’re willing to say “X” whenever you believe X, then if you say “I believe X” but aren’t willing to say “X”, your statement that you believe X is actually false. But in conversations, the rule that you’re willing to say everything you believe doesn’t hold.
Not exactly. If you assign 80% probability to something, you’re still allowed to say that you believe it.
It’s just an evaluation of your model, I believe.
Saying “I believe X” does seem to have different connotations than simply stating X; I’d be more likely to say “I believe X” when X is controversial, for example.
Specifically they’re different because of the pragmatic conversation rule that direct statements should be something your conversation partner will accept, in most normal conversations. You say “X” when you expect your conversation partner to say something like “oh cool, I didn’t know that.” You say “I believe X” when they may disagree and your arguments will come later or not at all. “It’s true that X” is more complicated; one example of use would be after the proposition X has already come up in conversation as a belief and you want to state it as a fact.
A: “I hear that lots of people are saying the sky is blue.” B: “The sky is blue.”
The above sounds weird. (Unless you are imagining it with emphasis on “is” which is another way to put emphasis on the truth of the proposition.) “The sky is blue” is being stated without signaling its relationship to the previous conversation so it sounds like new information; A will expect some new proposition and be briefly confused; it sounds like echolalia rather than an answer.
B: “The sky really is blue.
or
B: “It’s actually true that the sky is blue.”
sounds better in this context.
That’s a better explanation than I could come up with.
On a completely irrelevant note, why is “the sky is blue” the standard for “obviously true fact”? The sky is black about half the time, and it’s pretty common for it to be white, too.
If you count navy as blue rather than as black, that happens more rarely than “half the time”. (I’d say “10% of the time” as I have that number cached in my mind as the duty cycle of fluorescence detectors for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.) You know, the moon.
And when that happens, in places where electric lighting is widely used, it tends to become orange (not quite—does that colour have a name?) during the night!
I believe CronoDAS was referring to overcast days when they said the sky is sometimes white.
Yes, I was talking about his claim that “the sky is black about half the time”; I didn’t touch his claim that “it’s pretty common for it to be white”.
EDIT: Okay, failed reading comprehension of my own comment.
When the sky is white, it’s not the sky; it’s clouds blocking the sky. When the sky is black it’s just too dark to see the sky. At least that was my intuition before I knew that the sky wasn’t some conventionally blue object. I guess its a question of word usage whether the projective meaning of “blue” which is something like “looks blue under good lighting conditions” should still be applied when it’s not caused by reflectance. Though it’s not blue from all directions is it?
I would consider the clouds part of the sky, like the air, or the stars.
I’d say “sky” is a relative concept and depends on where you are. If I was on the mountainside and had clouds below me, I still wouldn’t say I’m in the sky. (But I would if I was on a plane, so it’s not as simple as “anything that’s above me”.)
And I’m on the ground right now. There doesn’t seem to be any clouds above me, but if there were, they’d be in the sky, and the sky would have white splotches.
I consider anything that is contiguously attached to the planet (or moon) which I am currently on (e.g. a man on a mountaintop), or less than about two metres from the ground (e.g. a man jumping up and down) to not be in the sky. Anything further than that from ground surface, and either currently ascending or able to maintain that altitude, counts as ‘in the sky’; anything further than that from ground surface and not able to maintain that altitude, counts as ‘falling from the sky’.
If I jump out of a second-floor window, I’m certainly falling, but I’m hardly falling from the sky.
The building is contiguously attached to the ground (unless it’s some sort of flying building). You need to be more than two metres away from it and falling to count as ‘falling from the sky’.
For safety reasons, it’s probably also better to throw an object—I’d suggest a tennis ball—if you actually want to perform an experiment. You could get it to the state ‘falling from the sky’ by throwing it hard enough horizontally from a fourth- or fifth-floor window, or dropping it off a bridge.
Hmmm… I may need to update my definition to consider the ‘dropped-from-a-bridge’ case.
I’d say that it has to be far enough from the ground that you wouldn’t notice the parallax effect if you walked around below it, it has to be above the horizon. Also, it can’t be an airplane or something. I’m not sure why exactly that last rule is there, given that meteors and such count. Maybe most people would consider it part of the sky. I’d say it’s in the sky, but not part of it.
What would you call a glass absorbing red/orange/yellow light and letting the rest through?
As I understand it, the sky does let red-yellow light through. It scatters blue light and lets red light through relatively unchanged. So it looks red-yellow near the light source and blue everywhere else.
Yes.
It’s something that everybody has quick access to. Another version would be “things fall”, which is better but also only works on a planet and with objects denser than air for example. It would be ideal to have some unchanging reference object that we can make statements about, instead we have something that everyone has seen and they can say “I have seen that, it was pretty much blue”
That it’s hard to come up with an “obviously true fact” that is in fact true without qualifications is itself interesting.
With close friends this works, saying “I believe X” signals uncertains where someone could help with avaliable information. But in public debates if you say “I believe X” instead of “X”, people will find more confidente and secure.
You’re right. I think the lesson we should take from all this complexity is to remember that the wording of a sentence is relevant to more than just it’s truth conditions. Language does a lot more than state facts and ask questions.
But this bring a tradeoff, how much do you sacrifice to show security and confidence? I suppose, there are people who tell the truth even in situations where this attitude will cause complications.
“God exists”—“I’ve had conversations with God; he’s a good fellow.”
“I believe that God exists”—“A lot of people say that God exists and I agree with them.”
“I believe that I believe that God exists”—“I do see some inconsistencies about God but I go to church and I pray. Plus all my friends are Christian, that means I’m a believer, right?”
“I believe that I believe that I believe that God exists”—“I think that what it means to believe in something is an aggregate of the actions you take and the anticipations you feel. So I can have doubt at the object level but still count as believing if I respond similarly to other believers...”
“I believe that I believe that I believe that I believe that God exists”—“Okay, I need to talk to fewer rationalists.”
Each ‘I believe’ implies a different meta level that you’re analyzing things. Kind of like confidence levels inside and outside an argument.
Doesn’t seem to me like the first “believe” you append implies a different meta level, just a different reason for believing. After all, the one who asserts “God exists” also believes God exists.
Or, maybe the way you’ve set it out, “I believe that God exists” is belief in belief, in which case in the next one, the extra “I believe” just indicates uncertainty.
I think that the general trend that you observed, that you tend to get more meta as you add more “I believes”, may be making you miss when the words “I believe” add nothing, or just mean “probably”.
I agree with Xachariah’s view of semantics. I think that the first ‘I believe’ does imply a different meta level of belief (often associated with a different reason for believing). His example does a good job of showing how someone can drill down many levels, but the distinction in the first level might be made more clear by considering a more concretely defined belief:
“We’re lost”—“I’m you’re jungle leader, and I don’t have a clue where we are any more.”
“I believe we’re lost”—“I’m not leading this expedition. I didn’t expect to have a clue where we were going, but it doesn’t seem to me like anyone else knows where we are going either.”
--
“Sarah won state science fair her senior year of high school”—“I attended the fair and witnessed her win it.”
“I believe that Sarah won state science fair her senior year of high school”—“She says she did, and she’s the best experimentalist I’ve ever met.”
“I believe that I believe that Sarah won state science fair her senior year of high school”—“She says she did, and I don’t believe for one second that she’d make that sort of thing up. That said, she’s not, so far as I can tell, particularly good at science, and it shocks me that she might somehow have been able to win.”
--
“Parachuting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” -- “I’ve gone parachuting, and frankly, I’ve gotten bigger adrenaline rushes playing poker.”
“I don’t believe parachuting’s all it’s cracked up to be.” -- “I haven’t gone parachuting. There’s no way I would spend $600 for a 4 minute experience when I can’t imagine that it’s enough fun to justify that.”
Without the ‘I believe,’ what I tend to be saying is, I trust the map because I drew it and I drew it carefully. With the ‘I believe,’ I tend to be saying I trust this map because I trust it’s source even though I didn’t actually create it myself. In the case of the parachuting, I don’t know where the map comes from, it’s just the one I have.
Placing additional “I believe”s in front of a statement changes what part of the statement you have confidence in.
The statement ‘I believe God exists’ usually does mean that someone places confidence in eir community’s ability to determine if God exists or not rather than placing confidence in the statement itself. Most of the religious people I know would say ‘God exists’ rather than ‘I believe God exists’ and most of them believe that they have directly experienced God in some way. However, most of them would say ‘I believe the Bible is true’ rather than ‘the Bible is true’—and when pressed for why they believe that, they tend to say something along the lines of “I cannot believe that God would allow his people to be generally wrong about something that important” or something else that asserts that their confidence is in their community’s ability to determine that ‘the Bible is true’ rather than their confidence being in the Bible itself. I don’t know if this is a very localized phenomenon or not since all of the people I’ve had this conversation with belong to the same community. It’s how I would tend to use the word ‘believe’ too, but I grew up in this community, so I probably tend to use a lot of words the same way as the people in this community do.
In Xachariah’s example the certainty/uncertainty is being placed on the definition of ‘believe’ at each step past the first one, so the way that the the statement is changing is significantly different in the second and third application of ‘I believe’ than it is in the first. The science fair example applies the ‘I believe’ pretty much the same way twice.
When I say “Sarah won science fair,” I’m claiming that all of the uncertainty lies in my ability to measure and accurately record the event. Her older sister is really good at science too; it’s possible that I’m getting the two confused but I very strongly remember it being Sarah who won. On the other hand, I’m extremely confident that I wouldn’t give myself the wrong map intentionally—I have no reason to want to convince myself that Sarah is better at science than she actually is.
That source of uncertainty essentially vanishes when the source of my information becomes Sarah herself. I now have a new source of uncertainty though because she does have a reason to convince me that she is better at science than she actually is. However, I trust the map because it agrees with what I’d expect it to be. I’d still think she was telling the truth about this if she lied to me about other things.
In the third case, I’m once again extremely confident that Sarah won science fair. She told me she did, and she tells the truth. What she’s told me does not at all agree with my expectations; I don’t really place confidence in the map, I place confidence a great deal of confidence in Sarah’s ability to create an accurate map, and I place a great deal of confidence in her having given me an accurate map. The map seems preposterous to me, but I still think it’s accurate, so when someone asks me if I believe that Sarah won science fair, I wince and I say “I believe that I believe that Sarah won science fair” and everyone knows what I mean. My statement isn’t really “Sarah won science fair.” It’s “Sarah doesn’t lie. Sarah says she won science fair. Therefore, Sarah won science fair.” If I later find out that Sarah isn’t quite as honest as I think she is, this is the first thing she’s told me that I’ll stop believing. Unless that happens, I’ll continue to believe that she won.
Precisely: for some reason you’re not allowed to say “I assign a 70% probability to X being true” without people looking at you funny, and even “I think X is more likely than not-X, but you shouldn’t be as confident of this as you are of most things I tell you” is kind of awkward, but “I believe so” is a pretty standard idiom for expressing high-probability-which-is-still-non-negligibly-different-from-1.
If you’re stuck trying to communicate in an innumerate language then you use whatever phrasing you have available.
“I suspect X” seems to be a compact phrasing that suggests considerable uncertainty, as is “I guess X”...
Also, “I would expect X”.
If you’re willing to say “X” whenever you believe X, then if you say “I believe X” but aren’t willing to say “X”, your statement that you believe X is actually false. But in conversations, the rule that you’re willing to say everything you believe doesn’t hold.
Not exactly. If you assign 80% probability to something, you’re still allowed to say that you believe it. It’s just an evaluation of your model, I believe.