I agree with you that other categories than beliefs and goals are often useful for understanding people, especially if you want to understand their experiences, but I worry that you may be advising throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Likely none of us literally have metaphysically basic beliefs, preferences, or goals. But, that being said, they seem a robust ontology for understanding human behavior and that’s why some of the greatest eliminative thinkers in the world—economists—use them to build their models. They even seem to work for modeling the behavior of animals and inorganic, reflective processes that we cannot examine the experiences of.
Beliefs, goals, preferences, etc. have their place in ontology; I think that place is just often not, as you notice, in understanding experiences of those who do not organize their own thoughts in those terms.
As you say, this applies to those who don’t have beliefs, or don’t organize their thoughts in those terms, not to all humans. We nerds do deal with propositional statements, after all, I do deduce my answers to people’s questions from my model of the world, and they will find all of my answers to be consistent much more often than would occur only by chance.
I think most of us work the same way, and enjoy the kinship of similar communication instincts. But I’ve so often misunderstood others, and think others might benefit from this insight as I did.
I agree with you that other categories than beliefs and goals are often useful for understanding people, especially if you want to understand their experiences, but I worry that you may be advising throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Likely none of us literally have metaphysically basic beliefs, preferences, or goals. But, that being said, they seem a robust ontology for understanding human behavior and that’s why some of the greatest eliminative thinkers in the world—economists—use them to build their models. They even seem to work for modeling the behavior of animals and inorganic, reflective processes that we cannot examine the experiences of.
Beliefs, goals, preferences, etc. have their place in ontology; I think that place is just often not, as you notice, in understanding experiences of those who do not organize their own thoughts in those terms.
I think we’re basically on the same page.
As you say, this applies to those who don’t have beliefs, or don’t organize their thoughts in those terms, not to all humans. We nerds do deal with propositional statements, after all, I do deduce my answers to people’s questions from my model of the world, and they will find all of my answers to be consistent much more often than would occur only by chance.
I think most of us work the same way, and enjoy the kinship of similar communication instincts. But I’ve so often misunderstood others, and think others might benefit from this insight as I did.