It’s hard to imagine what I would do if I believed nothing about the world, which seems the only way to make my decisions independent of my beliefs. I expect it would look like a seizure or coma.
No, that’s not the only alternative, and certainly not anything like what I have in mind here. You seem to have understood that part of the post as saying something very odd—like perhaps that I was objecting to the notion that one must have any kind of beliefs at all, about anything, before one can make any kind of decisions at all? But of course nothing remotely like that is what I meant.
(As an aside before I continue: please note that the thesis of the post does not rest on this point. As I say in the post, we can grant that beliefs are prior to decisions, and yet the logic I describe still goes through.)
No, what I object to is “beliefs are prior to decisions” as an axiom, i.e. “beliefs are always prior to decisions” (in other words, the idea that beliefs cannot be a consequence of decisions). Put that way, the problem should be obvious: surely my belief that I will go to the beach this evening is an effect of my decision to go to the beach this evening, and not a cause of it! The reason why I believe that I will go to the beach this evening is that I’ve decided to do so.
This is nothing more than the perfectly ordinary, intuitive account of decision-making. I am not claiming anything weird here. On the contrary, I am saying that the converse—the idea that one first comes to believe that one will do something, and only then (and as a consequence) decides to do that thing (or perhaps that coming to believe that one will take some future action, and deciding to take that action, are actually one and the same)—is what’s unintuitive and unnatural. But that strange view is precisely the view that one must hold, to think that there’s some sort of circularity involved in the view that the truth of a belief like “I will go to the beach this evening” can be evaluated via the Tarski criterion. On the normal and intuitive view, there is no circularity at all. That’s all that I’m saying in that part.
No, that’s not the only alternative, and certainly not anything like what I have in mind here. You seem to have understood that part of the post as saying something very odd—like perhaps that I was objecting to the notion that one must have any kind of beliefs at all, about anything, before one can make any kind of decisions at all? But of course nothing remotely like that is what I meant.
(As an aside before I continue: please note that the thesis of the post does not rest on this point. As I say in the post, we can grant that beliefs are prior to decisions, and yet the logic I describe still goes through.)
No, what I object to is “beliefs are prior to decisions” as an axiom, i.e. “beliefs are always prior to decisions” (in other words, the idea that beliefs cannot be a consequence of decisions). Put that way, the problem should be obvious: surely my belief that I will go to the beach this evening is an effect of my decision to go to the beach this evening, and not a cause of it! The reason why I believe that I will go to the beach this evening is that I’ve decided to do so.
This is nothing more than the perfectly ordinary, intuitive account of decision-making. I am not claiming anything weird here. On the contrary, I am saying that the converse—the idea that one first comes to believe that one will do something, and only then (and as a consequence) decides to do that thing (or perhaps that coming to believe that one will take some future action, and deciding to take that action, are actually one and the same)—is what’s unintuitive and unnatural. But that strange view is precisely the view that one must hold, to think that there’s some sort of circularity involved in the view that the truth of a belief like “I will go to the beach this evening” can be evaluated via the Tarski criterion. On the normal and intuitive view, there is no circularity at all. That’s all that I’m saying in that part.