What is the content of a belief?
Here's something I found myself puzzling over.
When you believe something, what is the content of the belief? A fact? The problem here is finding something to say when we have a belief about a fact that doesn't obtain. The belief: "I believe that the present King of France is bald" cannot have the fact that the present King of France is bald as its content, because there is no such fact. Further, presumably whatever the content of false beliefs is, it's also going to be the content of true beliefs. If I believe that it is raining outside, the content of that belief is the same whether it's true or false.
So one solution to this is to say that the content of a belief is a proposition (that the kind of France is bald). False propositions still exist to be able to function as the content of beliefs. Both true and false beliefs have propositions as contents. (In part, this is why we talk of propositions in the first place.)
But haven't we merely forestalled the problem? What is the content of a false proposition? Again, it cannot be a fact, so it must be something else. And, again, this something else must be the same whether the proposition is true or false, to capture the truth that the sense of a proposition does not depend on its truth. But what? Let's call it proposition*. And what is the content of proposition*? It cannot be a fact...
The standard thought is that facts cannot be the content of beliefs, because a belief can have no basis in reality, and because true and false beliefs have their content in common. But the worry is that this exact same problem is going to apply to any content of beliefs we specify, and any content of their content, and so on. Either, (a) we stop this regress at the start, by claiming that true and false beliefs have differing contents (externalism), and that a belief can have a non-obtaining fact as content, or (b) we find some reason to think that these problems that plague beliefs do not do so for propositions.
I suspect that (b) is both possible and standard, but I've never seen anyone do it. One thought is that propositions do not have "content" in the same sense that beliefs do, but I am not sure about this. Thoughts?
Yeah, I was puzzled by your
Yeah, I was puzzled by your assumption that propositions have (rather than just are) contents. We don't need to introduce fact*s to give content to facts; why would we need proposition*s to give content to propositions?
It's easy to get confused
It's easy to get confused with words here, but propositions are about something - that's what I meant by content.
Facts, on the other hand, aren't about anything, so there's no temptation to talk of their content.
Of course, maybe the sense in which propositions are about something is not the same sense in which beliefs are about something. That is, the sense in which they each have "content", in my broad sense, may differ. But how?
Al
I'm not really sure what it
I'm not really sure what it means to say that "propositions are about something", or why we should think this is true. Why not understand propositions more along the lines of facts? (The difference simply being that propositions may be false, whereas a non-obtaining 'fact' is no fact at all.)
Well, my thought was that
Well, my thought was that the proposition that "Alex is great" is about Alex, and greatness. More formally, you might say that a proposition is made true or false by the relationship in which it stands to something else (a truthmaker).
In contrast, facts do not gain their status from the relationship that they have to some further entity.
Al