Thought and Belief

General Philosophy
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This topic aims at thought and belief writ large. That is to say that it is about thought and belief that existed in its entirety long before we ever coined the terms “thought” or “belief” as well as thought and belief that came after such metacognitive endeavors. I will not discuss just human thought and belief. Rather, there is a much broader scope of discussion available, including thought and belief of other capable animals. This can include very contentious subject matter due to the underlying need for and current lack of a clear, well-established, and widely accepted framework capable of making sense of our own thought and belief as well as thought and belief of non-human animals.

I’m pleasantly surprised by a very recent article in the SEP titled Animal Thought (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) that may prove useful on the much broader topic in general. I was always disappointed that so little attention had been given to such a pivotal subject matter such as other animals’ thought and belief. The article can help establish a general state of convention, common approaches, and some of the issues and/or current controversies involved. I suggest reading it, if for no other reason, than to get some idea of where current convention is and/or has been on the subject, including key issues and/or potential problems. I found it both, interesting and useful, and if my approach is to be taken seriously, then at a bare minimum, it must make some sort of good sense in light of showing a decent grasp on current convention. I’m comfortable that it does.

That said, it seems imperative to begin by discussing our own thought and belief, including but not limited to, conventional frameworks and approaches as well as highlighting any potential issues that have arisen from them. I mean, where else can we start? It’s exactly what we find ourselves in need of doing. In addition, it will also behoove us all to pay very close attention to any and all frameworks/approaches when it comes to being capable of making any sense regarding the thought and belief of non-human animals as well. Undoubtedly, we will be faced with the need for assessing different approaches/frameworks, with particular attention being paid to how and if they come to sensible terms with non-human animals’ thoughts and beliefs as well as our own.

If it is the case that some non-human animals are capable of thought and/or belief, then any and all acceptable frameworks need to be perfectly adequate for and/or completely capable of taking proper account and/or making good sense of them. As it stands, I simply do not see that as being the case. I plan on setting out these shortcomings, but first a bit of prep work.

Academic western philosophy has a centuries long sorted history when it comes to talking about human thought and belief. Those two terms cover a wide variety of different things, depending on how the practitioner has come to use them. Arguably, some of the most common current conventional notions of thought and belief are inextricably linked to the idea of propositional content, and/or are propositional ‘in nature’. This is what the article linked above calls the “standard view”, and I’m guessing it largely stems from the historical notion of proposition and its long history in epistemology and philosophy of language. This underwrites so much current and past convention. Thought and belief are often treated as equivalent to propositions, as confirmed by looking at belief that approaches, the Gettier ‘problem’(scare quotes intentional), JTB, Moore’s paradox(it’s raining outside but s/he/they don’t believe it), and Russell’s broken clock. It is, perhaps, the most prevalent approach when taking account of our own thought and belief. In addition, many if not all conventional belief attribution practices are also underwritten by the idea that thought and belief are propositional in nature and/or have propositional content. Thus, perhaps this serves as the perfect place to start.

If all thought and belief are equivalent to propositions, then either propositions somehow exist in their entirety prior to language or language less creatures are incapable of forming, having, and/or holding thought and belief.

If all belief is propositional in content, then either propositions somehow exist in their entirety prior to language or language less creatures are incapable of forming, having and/or holding thought and belief.

I’ll stop here for now. Thanks for reading, and please by all means… participate if animal thought and belief interests you!

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I’ve suggested elsewhere that we can use “belief” for all of the expectant conduct of an animal. We include of course the conventional noises and markings of the human animal, but we need not single out “thought” as something that is radically other than the rest of the animals conduct.

A human makes the noise “proposition.” A human winks or nods or activates a turn signal. A cat leaps onto a piece of furniture. A human hurries up a staircase.

The “picturing-mode” of spoken signs among humans looks to me like a more complex version of the vervet monkey’s eagle warning cry.

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Not sure if animals have belief. Belief is entirely propositional in nature. It means that if you have belief, then you must be able to state your belief in linguistic forms.

I believe in the idea of freedom.
I believe that today is Tuesday.
I believe the water pipe in the loft is 15mm in diameter. (I have not been up to the loft and checked it out yet. But my belief is based on the other water pipes in the kitchen and garden were 15mm in diameter.)

Of course animals act intelligently for their survival and food in the world. But do they have belief? We never know.

We think they do, because we see their acts which we can imagine why they act such ways. It is our projections of belief onto the animals.

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My hyphen. (Sorry, it always bugged me!)

And, even if not all belief is propositional in content: say, if we can believe not only “that the mouse is food”, perhaps by being ready to make a move in a public symbol game and point a “food” token at a mouse (typically by uttering an obvious sentence), or by pointing a “true” token at a sentence; but if we can, also, believe by, say, pointing (somehow) a bowl-of-cream-picture at the mouse; what then?

Can’t we believe without having to be ready to join in a public symbol game?

Shouldn’t it be enough that we salivate to both mice and bowls of cream?

Was that your drift?

Edit: And if so, is the salivating perhaps a private symbol?

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I think it’s important to distinguish at this point the difference between thought and belief and what each means for propositional content.

Even though they sometimes get conflated they’re different things as thought is merely conscious occurrence of thoughts and/or ideas whereas belief implies commitment in whether a thought is true or will be true.

As for animals whether they have beliefs depends on the animal … a cat believes there will be treats in the drawer because that’s where you’ve kept them in the past and a crow will use thinking (thoughts) how to bend a wire to use it for hooking out food from a tricky place. So yes animals think and feel but are obviously not on par with humans when it comes to metacognition. Or for example animals are probably not capable of recursive propositional thought such as “I know that she knows that I fancy her”

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I agree with you in some sense. But can we try to parse this “metacognition” in terms of action that includes but is not limited to the use of marks and noises ?

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Is this a description of “true reality” or a report on how philosophers tend to use the word “belief” so far ?

Is belief “eternally” propositional, whether or not we say so ?

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Excellent OP, and I’m glad you’re approaching this slowly and carefully.

In that spirit, I’ll add another bit of conceptual clarification to this, from @invicta:

This is right, and we also need to distinguish between thought and proposition. This is a familiar discrimination, but needs to be made over and over, since it’s so easy to confuse the two terms.

A thought may have propositional content (though it may not, as well, at least according to me), but the thought itself is not that proposition. The thought happens in a particular mind, and at a particular time. A proposition is not limited in this way – or at least that’s the standard account (recently subjected to powerful critiques from Sebastian Rödl and Irad Kimhi). The proposition/thought relation is something like a type/token relation: My thought of “The cat is on the mat”, understood as an event that happens to me or that I cause to happen, is obviously not your thought, since we have two different minds and might not be thinking it simultaneously; but the propositional content is the same. Each thought is a kind of token of the type “My cat is on the mat.”

I’m not willing to go to battle for this account, but I suggest we adopt it in this discussion to avoid getting immediately confused between psychology and philosophy.

So that might mean amending your concluding sentence in this way:

If I understand you, you’re questioning whether the content of all thoughts/beliefs must be propositional, not whether the thought/belief itself is a proposition.

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Whatever you were believing, if you don’t state your belief in linguistic form, then I will never know what your belief is about, or if you have belief or imagination or just empty mind.

I can try to guess what you might be believing in or believe about, but it would be my projection of my guess on your belief.

I need your statements what you believe in, and what your belief is about to be able to know about your belief in detail, and confirm that you believe in something, or you have belief about something.

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Let’s say that you watch my put on a parachute and then jump out of the plane. We don’t talk. I just jump out of the plane.

Do I believe that the parachute will work ?

Another example:

I reach out to pet a large dog on the head. Do I believe that the dog will bite my hand ?

One more:

Why do we verbally share beliefs with one another in the first place ?

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I have no idea whether you believed it or not. You never told me if you believed it would work or not. All I saw was you jumped with it.

Again, I have no clue about your belief. All I saw was you reaching out to pet a large dog.

We don’t need to in most cases. Belief is not only to share with others. Sometimes you tell yourself that you believe in something, or you do something because you believe in something. It could be private mental state.

But to know others’ belief, we need the belief expressed in the statements. If not, there will only be guessing.

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Not sure what you mean by marks and noises although we must be at least aware of the chains of thought where one thought leads to another, an awareness of such causality happens at a metacognitive level. In doing this we can perhaps break the chains of cognitive causality by stopping to think entirely if that is possible and enter the realm of pure awareness or being. In essence thoughtlessness or even losing ourselves in flow or action which we often do when performing a given task or accomplishing a certain objective. (animals do this better as they have less background cognitive noise)

I often find some inconsequential thought or idea popping into my mind which may have been previously resolved yet sometimes cannot help myself from it appearing in my cognition, almost unwillingly. For me it’s just a temporary distraction so I either think of something else or distract myself some other way.

In terms of mark, signs and such they’re useful in directing ourselves. For example when you see a red light without the linguistic accompaniment or wording saying stop we know by association of the two that we need to stop.

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I swear…….I’m the proverbial moth to your flame.

Once more, into the breach. Keyword: once.

So……thought/ belief in general. Not this or that thought/belief relative to some possible possessor of it.

Such that investigations of general thought/belief may have common ground, rather than demonstrated in some particular theoretic paradigm.

While it is the case there is no possibility of humans discussing anything at all without the use of their own thought/belief system, such mere use cannot serve as a demonstration of thought/belief in general, from which would seem to follow that nothing of non-human thought/belief can be determined therefrom.

Propositional in nature conventionally, yes, on the one hand insofar as to speak of that system from which thought/belief is possible and thereby is propositional necessarily, is very far indeed for the immediate use of the system, which, on the other hand, is hardly propositional in content or nature, and serves to distinguish thought from belief.

While this may be true, if all thought/belief as such, in the sense of the OP, re: in general, is relational, all of propositions with respect to it are irrelevant, and, that language-less creatures being incapable of it, does not follow. They may in fact be incapable, but not for the reason that all thought/belief is propositional in content.

Or…..benefit of the doubt……it can be shown that propositional and relational are conceptually equivalent, or at least interchangeable without contradiction.

I’m of the opinion that to say sufficiently equipped creatures may have some species-specific form of thought/belief system apodeitically distinguishable from mere natural instinct, is not impossible, but I’m also of the opinion we are not sufficiently equipped to theorize anything about it with as much certainty as our own.

But……(sigh)……being human, what other opinion could I have?

Again, thanks for something to think about.

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Even with statenents of belief we can never be sure what other people believe. Religious people may state beliefs that facillitate acceptance in the group, as just one example.

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Yes, fair point. Beliefs are bound to change through time. And even the believers are not sure what they believe in or about themselves at times.

But when there is not belief statements, we have no clue whatsoever what they believe. Only things possible would be guessing, imagining and projecting of our own beliefs to other’s beliefs based on their actions, and behaviours.

Even with the belief statements, we have to be open minded on the actuality of the beliefs until verifications or evidence confirms the trust worthiness of the beliefs.

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Let’s say a man is charging at you screaming with a meat cleaver. Will you ask him to articulate his beliefs before irrationally jumping to conclusions ?

Do you see my point ?

I am suggesting that you are insisting that belief be internal stuff. This disconnects belief from practical life. Do we live like that ? Utterly dependent on words ?

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I am suggesting that the internal monologue can be thought of as a chain of remembered/imagined phonemes — the noise of speech.

It seems to me that we “think only in signs.” This is an overstatement perhaps that is intended to call attention to the relation of thought and public signs.

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Perhaps it would be useful for me to understand you better when you say you think in signs if you could give an example of such signs. Thinking in solitude does not necessarily have to be in terms of language, if that’s what you mean by signs.

When I am by myself I do not always think that way (in language or signs) as my awareness or self awareness bypasses the need for language when I’m immersed in the moment that is in the here and now. What this means is that I’m in a passive perceptive mode or observer non-linguistic thinking … perhaps Heidegger refers to this as Dasein.

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You are confusing belief with action. Action is not belief. You don’t need him articulating his belief for his actions. You would have no time for knowing his beliefs. You will have to grab anything and put him down before he will do you so.

It proves that belief is the mental state which is for the higher beings in intelligence, when it is based on the rationality and factual evidence.

Action is not belief. You are equating actions with belief, which seems to be causing you confusion here.

Not all actions are caused by belief. Some actions are caused by madness, uncontrollable anger or some other emotional imbalance, and irrational impulse, as well as illusions, delusions and groundless beliefs.

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I believe that you need to be able to tell the difference between actions and belief. They are not the same.

We can tell others’ intentions and motives by their actions, and we make judgements on those actions why they are performing such actions.

We don’t know or care what others believe until they articulate what they believe in statements. Even then, beliefs need verification to be qualified as true beliefs. Because beliefs can be false and groundless until verified as truth against the reality.